Representation and memory in graphic novels 9781472481566, 1472481569

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Comics, memory, and the visual archive
Introduction
Case examples: Comics and trauma
Methodology
Notes
Bibliography
Further reading
1. Migrant memories in Henry Yoshitaka Kiyama’s The Four Immigrants Manga and The Arrival by Shaun Tan
Introduction
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Further reading
2. Racism and cultural afterlives: American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang and Pat Grant’s Blue
Introduction
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Further reading
3. Narrating trauma in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis
Introduction
Bearing witness
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Further reading
4. Memories of illness in Epileptic by David B. and Stitches by David Small
Introduction
Epileptic by David B[eauchard]
David Small’s Stitches
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Further reading
5. Multimodal memories: The Photographer Into War-Torn Afghanistan with Doctors Without Borders by Guibert et al. and Waltz with Bashir by Ari Folman and David Polonsky
Introduction
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Further reading
6. Comics online: Memories from the exclusion zone in “At Work Inside Our Detention Centres: A Guard’s Story” by Wallman et al. and “Villawood” by Safdar Ahmed
Introduction
“A Guard’s Story”
“Villawood”
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Further reading
Afterword
Index

Citation preview

Representation and Memory in Graphic Novels

This book analyses the relationship between comics and cultural memory. By focussing on a range of landmark comics from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the discussion draws attention to the ongoing role of visual culture in framing testimony, particularly in relation to underprivileged subjects such as migrants and refugees, individuals dealing with war and oppressive regimes and individuals living with particular health conditions. The discussion is influenced by literary and cultural debates on the intersections between ethics, testimony, trauma, and human rights, reflected in its three overarching questions: ‘How do comics usually complicate the production of cultural memory in local contents and global mediascapes?’, ‘How do comics engage with, and generate, new forms of testimonial address?’, and ‘How do the comics function as mnemonic structures?’ The author highlights that the power of comics is that they allow both creators and readers to visualise the fracturing power of violence and oppression – at the level of the individual, domestic, communal, national and international – in powerful and creative ways. Comics do not stand outside of literature, cinema, or any of the other arts, but rather enliven the reciprocal relationship between the verbal and the visual language that informs all of these media. As such, the discussion demonstrates how fields such as graphic medicine, graphic justice, and comics journalism contribute to existing theoretical and analytics debates, including critical visual theory, trauma and memory studies, by offering a broad ranging, yet cohesive, analysis of cultural memory and its representation in print and digital comics. Golnar Nabizadeh is Lecturer in Comics Studies at the University of Dundee where she teaches on the MLitt in Comics and Graphic Novels, as well as undergraduate modules in English and Humanities. Her research interests are in graphic justice, critical theory, trauma and memory studies. She has published on the work of Alison Bechdel, Marjane Satrapi, and Shaun Tan, visual adaptation, picturebooks, and comics and literary justice.

Memory Studies: Global Constellations Henri Lustiger-Thaler, Ramapo College of New Jersey, USA and Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, France

The ‘past in the present’ has returned in the early twenty-first century with a vengeance, and with it the expansion of categories of experience. These experiences have largely been lost in the advance of rationalist and constructivist understandings of subjectivity and their collective representations. The cultural stakes around forgetting, ‘useful forgetting’ and remembering, locally, regionally, nationally and globally have risen exponentially. It is therefore not unusual that ‘migrant memories’; micro-histories; personal and individual memories in their interwoven relation to cultural, political and social narratives; the mnemonic past and present of emotions, embodiment and ritual; and finally, the mnemonic spatiality of geography and territories are receiving more pronounced hearings. This transpires as the social sciences themselves are consciously globalizing their knowledge bases. In addition to the above, the reconstructive logic of memory in the juggernaut of galloping informationalization is rendering it more and more publicly accessible, and therefore part of a new global public constellation around the coding of meaning and experience. Memory studies as an academic field of social and cultural inquiry emerges at a time when global public debate buttressed by the fragmentation of national narratives - has accelerated. Societies today, in late globalized conditions, are pregnant with newly unmediated and unfrozen memories once sequestered in wide collective representations. We welcome manuscripts that examine and analyze these profound cultural traces. Titles in this series Traumatic Storytelling and Memory in Post-Apartheid South Africa Performing Signs of Injury Christopher J. Colvin Memory in Transatlantic Relations From the Cold War to the Global War on Terror Kryštof Kozák, György Tóth, Paul Bauer and Allison Lynn Wanger Representation and Memory in Graphic Novels Golnar Nabizadeh

Representation and Memory in Graphic Novels

Golnar Nabizadeh

First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Golnar Nabizadeh The right of Golnar Nabizadeh to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Nabizadeh, Golnar, author. Title: Representation and memory in graphic novels / Golnar Nabizadeh. Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2019. | Series: Memory studies: global constellations ; 11 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018059992 (print) | LCCN 2018060210 (ebook) | ISBN 9781315605418 (ebk) | ISBN 9781317066101 (web pdf) | ISBN 9781317066095 (epub) | ISBN 9781317066088 (mobi/kindle) | ISBN 9781472481566 (hbk) Subjects: LCSH: Graphic novels--History and criticism. | Collective memory and literature. | Memory in literature. Classification: LCC PN6714 (ebook) | LCC PN6714 .N28 2019 (print) | DDC 741.5/9--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018059992 ISBN: 978-1-4724-8156-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-60541-8 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Taylor & Francis Books

Contents

List of figures Acknowledgements Introduction: Comics, memory, and the visual archive 1

vi viii 1

Migrant memories in Henry Yoshitaka Kiyama’s The Four Immigrants Manga and The Arrival by Shaun Tan

27

Racism and cultural afterlives: American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang and Pat Grant’s Blue

62

3

Narrating trauma in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis

89

4

Memories of illness in Epileptic by David B. and Stitches by David Small

112

Multimodal memories: The Photographer Into War-Torn Afghanistan with Doctors Without Borders by Guibert et al. and Waltz with Bashir by Ari Folman and David Polonsky

138

Comics online: Memories from the exclusion zone in “At Work Inside Our Detention Centres: A Guard’s Story” by Wallman et al. and “Villawood” by Safdar Ahmed

163

2

5

6

Afterword

185

Index

190

Figures

Cover image: © Zuzanna Dominiak 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 1.1 1.2

1.3

1.4

1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8 1.9 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4

“Comics and Memory. After Winsor McCay”. “Winsor McCay, Little Sammy Sneeze, 24 September 1905”. “Mother and Son”. © Yoshihiro Tatsumi. “I saw the hell inside me…”. “U.S. Immigration Station, Angel Island, San Francisco Bay, View Showing Wharf and Main Building, 1910”. “Arrival in San Francisco”. The Four Immigrants Manga: A Japanese Experience in San Francisco, 1904–1924 by Henry (Yoshitaka) Kiyama, translated by Frederik L. Schodt, p. 30. “A Visit from the President”. The Four Immigrants Manga: A Japanese Experience in San Francisco, 1904–1924 by Henry (Yoshitaka) Kiyama, translated by Frederik L. Schodt, p. 89. “The Turlock Incident”. The Four Immigrants Manga: A Japanese Experience in San Francisco, 1904–1924 by Henry (Yoshitaka) Kiyama, translated by Frederik L. Schodt, p. 124. “Escape – Draft Sketch”. “Originary Montage”. The Arrival by Shaun Tan. “Departure”. The Arrival by Shaun Tan. “Dissolve – part 1”. The Arrival by Shaun Tan. “Dissolve – part 2”. The Arrival by Shaun Tan. “Counter-narrative (detail)”. Pat Grant, Blue, 2012. Creative Commons Attribution. “The Mongolian Octopus – his grip on Australia”. Philip May, The Bulletin, 21 August 1886. “Transition (detail)”. Pat Grant, Blue, 2012. “Recognition (detail)”. Pat Grant, Blue, 2012.

4 9 13 16 32

33

37

39 44 50 52 55 56 77 79 80 83

List of illustrations 6.1 “White Bars”. Image provided courtesy of Sam Wallman, Nick Olle, Pat Grant, and Pat Armstrong. “At Work Inside Our Detention Centres: A Guard’s Story” (February 2014). 6.2 “Wounded Head”. 6.3 “Untethered Contents”. 6.4 “Marking Boundaries”. 6.5 “Symbolic Composition”. 6.6 “Couplets in Urdu”.

vii

170 171 174 176 178 179

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for the support of many people whose encouragement and care enriched the long process through which this book came to fruition. The book was started in Perth, Western Australia, and completed in Dundee, Scotland. In Australia, I’d like to thank David Barrie, Ned Curthoys, Joy Damousi and the Kathleen Fitzpatrick Fellowship Program, Kieran Dolin, Wendy Grace, Gareth Griffiths, Tony Hughes-d’Aeth, Gail Jones, Judy Johnston, Jane Lydon, Lee-Von Kim, Adam Nicol, Rajesh Krishnamuti, Andre Crozier, Des Manderson, Philip Mead, Bruce Mutard, National Library of Australia, Sophie Sunderland, Peter Morgan, Katie Tonkin, Bob White, Sam Hutchison who provided valuable feedback on several chapter drafts, and the Crowe and Nabizadeh families. I also thank Shaun Tan, Sam Wallman, and Safdar Ahmed, whose respective works I write about here, for their artistic generosity and help with my queries. In the UK, I’d like to thank Jen Barnes, Sue Black, Daniel Cook, Laura Findlay, Carmen Garcia del Rio, Jo George, Dominic Smith, Matt Graham, Damon Herd, Brian Hoyle, Martine van Ittersum, Divya Jindal-Snape, the Livesey-Stephens family, Monty Nero, Joan Ormrod, Andrew Roberts, Julia Round, Roger Sabin, Ana Salzberg, Aliki Varvogli, Phil Vaughan, Keith Williams, colleagues in the School of Humanities, and the fantastic artists at InkPot Studios. I’d also like to thank the MLitt in Comics and Graphic Novels cohorts for 2016/17 and 2017/18 for their enthusiasm and insights into the world of comics. To Zu Dominiak, thank you for designing and illustrating the cover of this book, and special thanks to Catriona Laird for drawing the three-panel strip in Figure 0.1. In other parts of the world, I thank Angelika Bammer and Ian Gordon, for their interest in my research, and also send special thanks to Fred Schodt for his invaluable insights on The Four Immigrants Manga. I extend many thanks to Drawn & Quarterly Publications, Stone Bridge Press, Hachette Australia, and Pat Grant, for providing permission to use the respective images in this book. Sections of Chapter 1 on The Arrival were previously published in ‘Visual melancholy in Shaun Tan’s The Arrival’ in Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 5.3 (2014), pp. 366–379, and is reprinted here with permission of the publisher, Taylor & Francis Ltd. A

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ix

portion of Chapter 2 previously appeared in ‘Visualising risk in Pat Grant’s Blue: xenophobia and graphic narrative’ in Textual Practice 31.3 (2017), pp. 537–552, available from www.tandfonline.com. Parts of Chapter 3 were first published in ‘Vision and precarity in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis’, WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 44.1 & 2 (2016), pp. 152–167. Copyright © 2016 by the Feminist Press at the City University of New York. Used with permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of the publishers, www.feministpress.org. All rights reserved. Parts of Chapter 6 first appeared in the article ‘Comics online: Detention and white-space in “A Guard’s Story”’, published in ariel: A Review of International English Literature 47.1–2 (2016), pp. 337–357. Copyright © 2016 The Johns Hopkins University Press and the University of Calgary, and are reprinted here with permission from Johns Hopkins University Press. At Routledge, I am indebted to Alice Salt for her support and help at every stage of the manuscript. I also want to acknowledge Henri Lustiger-Thaler’s feedback on the finished work, for which I am enormously appreciative. I am particularly grateful to Chris Murray for his extensive feedback on the manuscript, and for his indelible support and friendship since I arrived at Dundee. Mayra Crowe has been an amazing friend, who I was lucky enough to meet during my first week at Dundee. Thank you for your unforgettable generosity and spirit. I am grateful to Narges Razavi, the best, best friend anyone could wish for, and for her love, kindness, and support for more than 29 years. Special thanks to my parents, Mali and Sohrab Nabizadeh for their support, love, inspiration, and trust. And finally, to Matthew Crowe, without whose steadfast encouragement and selflessness I would not have moved to Dundee to take up the opportunity of a lifetime, and also for his brilliant feedback on the manuscript.

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Introduction: Comics, memory, and the visual archive

Introduction This book explores the representation of memory in comics and graphic novels from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The lines of inquiry along which the discussion proceeds are two-fold. In the first instance, the book examines the way that modern comics represent personal, political, social, and historical memories, and argues that comics can help recover marginalised and minority voices from the peripheries of representation. As a once-maligned art form, comics are ideally suited to representing the plurality of lived experiences because they rely on exploratory, experimental, and unorthodox modes of representation to raise their readers’ awareness of social, political, and historical issues, and ontological approaches to these concerns. Indeed, as Hans-Christian Christiansen has suggested, comics have inherently unique features which would tend to promote formal play of potentially disruptive kind: for instance the anti-naturalistic iconography and the deconstructive or conflictual play between word and picture and picture-sequence. (Magnussen and Christiansen 2000, 118) In turn, this “formal play” and playing with form helps generate varied representations of identity and lived experiences, iterations that are particularly vital to supplementing personal, historical and cultural archives. The plasticity of the comics form allows such narratives to enliven alternate ways of seeing, and in doing so, help denaturalise the operation of normative discourses that either wholly or partially elides these subject positions. I suggest that this is especially significant for groups whose voices have traditionally been ignored, and who all too readily continue to be dismissed, such as women, refugees and asylum seekers, and individuals living with stigmatised physical and mental health conditions, some of whose stories this book explores. So far, comics have most powerfully brought to light these narratives in the form of autobiographical comics, whose alternate ways of seeing promote alternate ways of understanding.

2

Introduction

Scholarship in the field of memory studies – a divergent, multi-faceted, and sprawling body of literature – demonstrates the relevance of memory studies in the present. As an associative, and fundamentally creative process, the term ‘memory’ houses a variety of processes. As the editors of Memory Studies stated in the inaugural issue of the journal, scholars have fractioned memory into various processes and systems. In psychology, for example, distinctions have been made between short-term and long-term memory; episodic, semantic and procedural memory; perceptual and conceptual processing in memory; and on and on. (Roediger and Wertsch 2008, 10) The authors then go on to note that the proliferation of terms such as those listed above are testament to “the centrality of the subject to so many fields”. Indeed, the analyses in this book borrow from research in comics studies, literature, history, sociology, psychology, and medicine among others as they each offer important insights into the study of memory. Neuroscientific research into the construction of memory has found that they are not only coded at their time of origin, but that their codification may be altered through the act of recollection. As Alan Baddeley et al. (2015) note, “memory in general, and autobiographical memory in particular, is like to be influenced by our hopes and needs” (314). In a memory experiment described as “The War of the Ghosts” from 1932, the British psychologist Frederic Bartlett presented a translation of a mesmerising Native American story to selected subjects, asking them to retell the story at various intervals after its initial transmission. Among his conclusions, Bartlett noted that “accuracy of reproduction [retelling], in a literal sense, is the rare exception and not the rule” (1995, 93). He also observed that the reproductions could often be traced to “a play of visual imagery”, which was itself attuned to the subject’s “attitude or point of view”, such that any material that seemed to fit that perspective would be rapidly utilised in the act of recall (90). More recently, the team of Richard Morris, Tim Bliss, and Graeme Collingridge was awarded the 2016 Lundbeck Foundation Brain Prize for their work on long-term potentiation and synaptic plasticity, a project that uncovered significant findings about the work of memory. Describing the team’s findings, Morris surmised that “the essence of memory is representation”, noting the importance of being able to imagine things in the mind’s eye, a process he describes as a “memory trace” (“How Are Memories Formed?”, BBC Radio 2016). Although these respective findings were established more than 80 years apart, they both point to the fundamental importance of imagination and visual play in the creation of personal memories. Far from being a static scene that is simply ‘pulled’ into the conscious mind, then, the act of recollection – such as that involved in episodic memory – is an active process. Clinical research suggests that “[r]etrieved memories are subject to change each time they are recalled” (Rydberg 2017, 94) and that all memories are reconstructed to some extent (Blue Knot Foundation, n.d.). The conditions under which recollection takes place can

Introduction

3

also affect the details rendered, particularly notable in stressful settings such as a police station or a courtroom. It is for this reason that eyewitness testimonies, for example, are treated with a careful awareness of the way that witnesses can unwittingly provide unreliable information, particularly in circumstances in which a significant amount of time has lapsed between an event and its recollection. This understanding draws attention to the ways in which episodic memories are frequently incomplete, unreliable, and whose truth-value may be contested, or extrapolated, in reflective and productive ways. As Freud argued in the The Interpretation of Dreams, “[o]ur memory has no guarantees at all, and yet we bow more often than is objectively justified to the compulsion to believe what it says”. Erll and Rigney (2009) gesture towards this impulse in their introduction to Cultural Memory, arguing that remembering is “as much a matter of acting out a relationship to the past […] as it is a matter of preserving and retrieving earlier stories” (2). Much like memory, comics are “polysemiotic” – composed of words and images – and are characterised by their diversity of representation and the potentially endless ways in which we tell stories about one another and ourselves. The Australian artist Stuart Campbell, also known as Sutu, depicts the link between imagination and memory in an online comic called “These Memories Won’t Last” (2016). Nominated for an Eisner Award in the category of Best Digital/Webcomic, the work explores Campbell’s grandfather’s battle with dementia, accompanied by a soundtrack written by the London-based sound designer Lhasa Mencur. One of the innovations of this work is that the images fade over time as the reader scrolls through the work, so that it is underwritten by a sense of loss. In Campbell’s words, the “deterioration” of the comic is designed to mimic his grandfather’s memories.1 Leveraging off Scott McCloud’ s concept of “closure”, Christopher Pizzino argues that the “language of comics is defined by discontinuity; each image is articulated in relation to others from which it is nonetheless distinct” (2015, 636).2 McCloud’s description of closure itself draws from the field of perceptual psychology and specifically Gestalt psychology, in which the principle of closure or completion refers to the “perceptual tendency to unite incomplete or partially interrupted figures” (Wertheimer 2012, 185). Our ability to imagine and construct images from minimal visual scaffolding is essential for not only the way we make sense of the world but may also account for our tendency to believe that we remember more than we really do (expressly referred to in the film Waltz with Bashir discussed in Chapter 5). For example, Baddeley et al. devised an experiment on the recall of autobiographic memories [defined as “memory across the lifespan for both specific events and selfrelated information” (2015, 299)], and considered that, [i]nstead of seeing [autobiographical memory] as a landscape of potential memories extending into the distance with striking peaks of vivid memories and less clear valleys, the experience [of the participants] seemed much more analogous to perceiving a limited series of islands of memory in a sea of forgetting. (2015, 303)

4

Introduction

To use some of these terms, comics panels can perhaps be regarded as sites of remembrance placed within the gutters (the spaces between the panels) as a “sea of forgetting” or at least of unconscious memory. If we understand, then, that the act of recollection is not only a neurological process, but also a creative one, then we can see how art and literature, including comics, hinging as they do on the act of representation, offer an invaluable scaffold through which to explore the theme of memory. Furthermore, comics, as they involve processes of inclusion and exclusion, are able to explore and in many cases confront the limitations of memory. By offering fragments of an imagined world, they encourage readers to ‘fill in the blanks’, thereby investing creatively in the story. Further, comics enact the relationship between storytelling and time so that the present speaks back to, and carries traces of the past in the words and images. This assertion can be concretised if one imagines a three-panel strip; taken as a whole the panels can be seen to move through time, their relationality enacting a movement between the past, present, and the future in a condensed combination of image and text (Figure 0.1). This simple sequence demonstrates how readers can interpret the passage of time not only in relation to the content of each panel (synchronically) but also diachronically over the duration of the sequence. The strip demonstrates what Art Spiegelman identified as the ability of comics to “put the past and present together” (Andy Smith 2010, 405), and how these pockets of time are represented through the specificities of their material construction. As the discussion will demonstrate, memories of panel contents may be evoked directly or indirectly throughout a comic, supplying readers with a potentially endless chain of interpretative associations. These possibilities mean that the unfolding of time can be interpreted in tandem with the unfolding of the text as well as subconscious links to link together otherwise disparate moments. Readers move through time as they read comics; how they do so, and how the text asks its readers to engage with the panels and the spaces around them, is what makes comics such a useful vehicle for thinking about, imagining, and representing memory.

Figure 0.1 “Comics and Memory. After Winsor McCay”. © Golnar Nabizadeh & Catriona Laird.

Introduction

5

The temporal innovations of comics as they structure various moments through time help explore the exigencies attached to memories, private and public, because they can respond to, and shape, conscious and unconscious impulses. Charles Hatfield’s suggestion that the comics form is “infinitely plastic” because “there is no single recipe for reconciling the various elements of the comics page” (2005, xiv) is useful as an analogue to similar tensions in memory itself. As Andreas Huyssen writes, memory discourses are absolutely essential to imagine the future and to regain a strong temporal and spatial grounding of life and the imagination in a media and consumer society that increasingly voids temporality and collapses space. (2003, 6) Comics can help restore a sense of “spatial grounding” as they reconstruct lived and imagined experiences through the particularised materiality of the text. Unlike memories, however, comics panels generally do not disappear in time – they remain planted on the page through frames, words, and images – ready for revisiting, remembering, and working through. Hillary Chute and Marianne DeKoven suggest that comics are “cross-discursive” because words and images “do not simply blend together, creating a unified whole, but rather remain distinct” (2006, 769). Importantly, as these elements work together, they retain their place as discrete bundles of information and therefore maintain narrative tension as they generate meaning. With the preceding comments in mind, this book responds to the following questions: 1 2 3

How do comics complicate the production of cultural memory in local and global contexts? How do comics engage with, and generate, new forms of testimonial address, particularly for minority or disenfranchised subjects? and How do comics work as a mnemonic structure/form?

This book explores comics that depart from the anodyne, texts that seek to unsettle and agitate, and in so doing, ask readers to think critically about their others, and themselves, and to carve out multidirectional memories. To take one example, in Joe Sacco’s Palestine (2003), captions are frequently placed at unusual angles, requiring the reader to pay close attention to the text as they jostle, and are abraded, by the images they accompany. The reader must constantly adapt his or her eye line to take in the abstruse political realities of living under Occupation, and this reading practice provides a haptic, representational, analogue of the complications that mark the lives of many Palestinians. In his introduction to the book, Edward Said wrote of comics as an “antidote” to a “media saturated world” because they allowed him to “think and imagine and see differently”. He continues that comics

6

Introduction seemed to say what couldn’t otherwise be said, perhaps what wasn’t permitted to be said or imagined, defying the ordinary processes of thought, which are policed, shaped and re-shaped by all sorts of pedagogical as well as ideological pressures. (2003, ii)

The ability of comics to “detain” – in Said’s words (v) – readers is important, particularly in environments where sound bites and images are quickly – often feverishly – consumed and with rapidity forgotten. By contrast, there is a melancholic impulse at work in comics – they animate memories through the static arrangement of panels on the page and which remain unchanging over time. This allows highly individualised interpretation of time and duration to emerge between reader and text – in contrast to cinematic time – because “the comic panel acts both as a still image and a shot, a capture of duration” (Greg M. Smith 2015, 232). The arrangement of panels also allows artists to play with time in novel ways, such that the panels generate a textual pulse through their dimensions and other rhythmic properties. For example, a panel with an extended width might be interpreted as incorporating a longer duration in time than a panel of equal height but of shorter width. Similarly, a panel without a frame may be regarded as having broken through or ‘out of’ the diegesis, representing the impact of trauma such that it disrupts the constellation of the quotidian, a subject that has been extensively discussed in comics scholarship (Hirsch, Chute, Chaney). Such a technique is evident in comics narrating traumatic events such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus (2003), Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (2003/04), GB Tran’s Vietnamerica (2010), or Stitches (2009) by David Small, among many others. Jared Gardner usefully posits that, “[c]omics, always rooted in the narrative structure of shocks, fragments, and discontinuities, found itself increasingly defined as primitive and childish” compared with the mythos of ‘persistence of vision’ that shapes the cinematic viewing experience (2012, 13). By engaging with these and other visual strategies, comics readers are drawn into a highly active relationship with the text as they make connections between the panels to traverse the space of the gutter, and creatively reconstruct the cognitive perception of time and memory. Modern comics are frequently concerned with exploring the invisible and visible worlds that mark the lived experiences of minorities, and provide an alternate form of remembrance to supplement and intervene on discourses surrounding marginalised subjects. The widespread loss of life, migration flows, and ecological destruction, coupled with the accelerated rise of technology attests to the fragmentation that lay behind ‘grand narratives’, and which the project of postmodernism calls into question. This awareness means that the medium makes full use of characteristics such as parody, juxtaposition, humour, irony, and experimentation with the representation of the subject as a porous and unbounded entity. As Hans-Christian Christiansen argues, “[c]omics thus are in general consonant with postmodernist themes: the challenging of authority from social hierarchies and the challenging of textual illusionism per se” (Magnussen and Christiansen 2000, 118). These tropes allow creators and readers to make

Introduction

7

full use of multiple mediascapes where visual media such as film, television, online and social media, and advertising, create chains of associations and networks of meaning. In this non-cohesive ecology, individual remembrance frequently acts as an interface with cultural, collected, and national memories. As Henri Lustiger-Thaler argues in relation to the contemporary significance of intersubjectivity, it returns us to the centrality of the individual voice as a critical interpreter/ interlocutor within an intersubjective/intergenerational field, and not as a mere proxy for the veteran or survivor, nor as a surrogate for a “therapeutic popular sense of the authentic and experiential”, but a separate field of ongoing meaning-making about the past in the present. (2013, 915) In this regard, it is perhaps unsurprising that many of the comics studied in this book are autobiographical or are structured around a singular voice, given the primacy of autobiographical stories and memoirs as conduits for narrating the after-effects of traumatic histories, particularly after the traumas of the two World Wars, which have had an epochal effect on the discussion of trauma as well as on memory studies itself. In this respect, I borrow from Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney’s suggestion to supplant the false dichotomy between history and memory with the concept of ‘modes of representation’, which includes a plurality of approaches to the past, and “proceeds from the basic insight that the past is not given, but must instead continually be re-constructed and re-presented” (2009, 7), or as Marek Tamm puts it, to treat history as a “mode of remembering, as a mnemonic practice” (italics in original, 2008, 500) as he draws on the work of Aleida Assman, James Olick, and Susan Suleiman. This book thus investigates the representation of modern memory as an atomised or fragmented phenomenon, one that is intrigued by the notion of detritus in the wake of the tragedies that punctuated the twentieth century and which continue into the twenty-first. Many of the works I examine herein concern subjects whose acknowledgement and remembrance have, and continue to be, relegated to an exclusion zone beyond formal channels of recognition, whose stories interface the personal and the political. And yet, this does not mean that this zone is forgotten, but to the contrary, the partial exclusion of these subjects is, as Bhabha suggests, part of the repressed foundations that help structure projections of national identity (Location of Culture, 1994, Chapter 8). In the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, nonfiction became an increasingly popular genre, in which, [m]any women, people of color, gays and lesbians, immigrants, and the disabled wrote memoirs and participated in documenting how the personal was political. One theme that emerged from personal histories in this time period was trauma. (Gilmore and Marshall 2013, 20)

8

Introduction

This leads to the second line of argumentation this book pursues; that modern comics embed loss within their structure, where the appearance of the panels (and their contents) is interrupted by their disappearance (or absent presence) of the gutters – the space in-between the panels. Thus comics access the instability that resides at the heart of memory as they capture its appearance and disappearance. Formalised by Freud as Fort/da in his recollection of his grandson’s games with a spool, comics convey and conceal meaning through words and images – what the scholar and art historian W.J.T. Mitchell similarly identifies as the “game of appearance and disappearance” (What Do Pictures Want 2004, 68). Autobiographical comics frequently show how individuals and communities may respond to and grapple with trauma and loss, and frequently in resilient and generative ways, like the creative play of Fort/da. The gutters function as a space that permits forgetting, and that this absence of ‘content’ is fundamental to formation of narrative. The narrative discontents, what it cannot contain, can spill over into the gutter as a space of unconscious play. What is occluded from the frame is just as valuable as what is included in generating, paradoxically, a ‘whole’ picture of the text’s story-world. Early comics were ephemera in a material sense – designed to last only a day or two after their publication in Sunday newspapers. The 1950s saw the rise of censorship in comics across the United States and Australia, and formalised in the UK in the Children and Young Persons (Harmful Publishing) Act of 1955, as authorities became concerned with the alleged detrimental impact of comics on the social behaviour of children and adolescents. In recent decades, this trend has been reversed, as comics have become popular vehicles for social criticism, often in the form of autobiography and memoir. Comics are frequently drawn by people on the margins, they can be hand-made, self-printed, and distributed online. As Jared Gardner argues, “it cannot be entirely a coincidence that at precisely the period of the greatest wave of new immigration into the United States [eighteenth and nineteenth centuries]—predominantly from Eastern Europe and Asia—the sequential comics form first emerged in the United States”, and that the shift in the newspaper workforce helped shape the emergence of stories about “racial and ethnic ‘Others’” (2010, 135). Reflecting on a contemporary context, Sidonie Smith suggests that [i]n the global currents of rights politics, graphic witnessing to crises and to the crises of representing radical violence and harm contributes to the rearrangement of “opinion and emotion” related to histories of injustice, violent events, projects of remembering and agendas for redress (2011, 70) Writing on borders and conflict zones, Luisa Passerini’s comments regarding a panel of speakers are equally apt in relation to comics panels, when she states “[i]n the case of the panel, the multiple narrations reflect the multiplicity of memory, its protean nature, and its need of contextualisation” (2016, 454).

Introduction

9

Case examples: Comics and trauma The significance of breakage and loss can be located in the work of Freud and the conception of trauma as a psychological shock that recapitulated the concept from its physical origins into a psychic domain of inquiry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This development finds a visual counterpart in comics that were produced around the same time as Freud’s work was shaping modern psychology. A playful invocation of framing and its disruption is evident in comics such as Winsor McCay’s Little Sammy Sneeze, which was published in the New York Herald between 1904 and 1906, to enormous popularity. In this strip, the eponymous character’s sneeze develops over the course of each episode, its release often wreaking havoc on domestic and social settings. McCay privileges the action of the sneeze, and demonstrates its power not only within the mise-èn-scene but also on the framing of the story, an action that exemplifies the playful, reflexive, awareness that comics bring to storytelling. These characteristics are writ large in a metatextual strip from 24 September 1905, where Sammy’s sneeze is so powerful that it shatters the frame that holds him (Figure 0.2). McCay conveys the force of the sneeze through the expanding dimensions of the speech balloon, and reinforced lettering of “CHOW”, which rattles Sammy with its strength as it shatters the screen that becomes visible. Bookending the strip’s title are the statements: “He just simply couldn’t stop it” and “He never knew when it was coming”. The “it” refers to the sneeze, but

Figure 0.2 “Winsor McCay, Little Sammy Sneeze, 24 September 1905”. Originally appeared in the New York Herald, 24 September 1905.

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Introduction

read more broadly, acquires a more universal association with the shocks that would permeate the twentieth century – such as the sinking of the RMS Lusitania, the devastation of the two World Wars, civil and political conflicts worldwide – and which continue to the present day. In McCay’s strip, the sneeze anticipates the hallmarks of trauma – as McCay configures “it” as something that cannot be forestalled, or prevented, and which calls into question pre-existing ontologies and epistemologies of the subject that smash previous frames of reference. In a move that implicitly borrows from the ridicule of Gogol’s The Nose (1836), and which anticipates the displacement of social norms in Surrealist art and the dissociative techniques of Dada, McCay maximises the disruptive potential of the everyday sneeze. This arrangement speaks to the persistence of trauma within the quotidian as its presence is made known through unbidden flashbacks, nightmares, and hallucinations. In the last panel of the strip, the reader observes Sammy with the broken frame jumbled around him. The metaphorical panel now acquires a material reality, signifying the multiple levels at which comics panels (and their frames) supply meaning. What was once invisible – the pane – is now brought into focus through the ‘shock’ of the action causing it to collapse – thereby highlighting the artifice of the scene itself. The frame’s shattering has supplanted the viewing conventions with which the sequence began. The reader, along with Sammy, moves into a new relation with the text – one that could be described as ‘traumatised’ – with the challenges and opportunities that such a disruption offers. The example from Little Sammy Sneeze demonstrates the playful, subversive, and generative capacity of comics to challenge social and political status quos through an efficient co-mixing of image and text that utilises only six panels to establish a sense of ruptured time and space. Indeed, comics do not stand outside of literature, cinema, or any of the other arts, but rather enliven the reciprocal relationship between the verbal and the visual language that informs all of these media, what Annabelle Honess Roe describes as “mutual enrichment” (2013, 6). Think for example of the visual tour de force of the Lotus Eaters chapter in Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) in the way that this episode throbs with colour and chaos, and the intimate relationship between early cinema and comics, exemplified in works adapted from the latter into film, such as The Sprinkler Sprinkled (1895) by the Lumière Brothers. Yet, as Lance Rickman notes, a sense of visual sophistication was already apparent as approximately eight years before the Lumières projected their first frame of film, and longer still before the cinema would tentatively employ deliberate and motivated editing, a wide and general audience in France could not only decipher, but were familiar and comfortable with, visual narratives that employed sophisticated and complex variations in viewpoint and shot-scale. (2008, 15)

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Comics such as Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland (1905–1926) portray a similar lively confusion in eponymous character’s dreamscapes, as does a comic like David Shenton’s Salome (1986), which invokes the drama and excess of the original in its complex composition as a visual ‘rock opera’. McCay, who was also a cartoonist and animator, spent around two years composing the drawings that would comprise the 12-minute animation, “The Sinking of the Lusitania”, which was released three years after the event in 1918. The RMS Lusitania was a merchant cruise ship that was torpedoed by the German navy on 7 May 1915 around 18 kilometres off the Old Head of Kinsale on the southern coast of Ireland.3 Of 1,959 passengers and crew, 1,198 people drowned, the incident causing outrage to the families and broader community in the United States and the United Kingdom. The event played a significant political and cultural role in revealing the devastating impact of armament technology, as well as inciting the United States to enter into World War I. Though there was no visual record of the event, the technology of animation allowed it to be imagined and reconstituted; the viewer, for example, is afforded an underwater perspective that allows them to observe the approach of the German torpedo. As J.P. Telotte argues, McCay’s juxtaposition of created and negative spaces in the film “underscores an important if generally overlooked link between animation and the avant-garde: a reminder not simply of animation’s subversive possibilities and ideological positioning, but also of its ability to tap into the evocative, even disturbing power of space itself” (2010, 5). As one of the film’s inter-titles state, “[t]wenty-five thousand drawings had to be made and photographed one at a time”. At the time, the film was the longest animation produced, and is now recognised as one of the earliest animated documentaries (Wells 1998, 116; Kraemer 2015, 57). Its documentary genre anticipates the multimodality of comics in contemporary works such as Spiegelman’s Maus, which combines drawn images with photographs. The animation’s intertitles commemorate the presence of some of the more prominent passengers on board through the inclusion of their photograph and descriptions of their work, such as that for “Elbert Hubbard, Modern Philosopher and Author” (McCay). The impact of the film, designed as both elegy and propaganda, arouses horror and disbelief. As Joseph Kraemer suggests, McCay’s work foregrounds “the simultaneous modernist tendencies toward experiencing human catastrophe and the artistic struggle toward representation of the societal and personal effects of this tragedy, namely that of trauma” (Saltzman and Rosenberg, ix quoted in Kraemer 2015, 58). Further, the shift between animation and inter-titles introduces viewers to two registers of meaning, which help generate, rather than interrupt meaning-making. We see the ongoing relevance of this debate in Chapter 5 on comics and multimodality, and specifically in relation to Guibert et al.’s The Photographer (2006) (comics and photography) and Waltz with Bashir (2008) by Ari Folman and David Polonsky (animation and video). I turn now to discuss a short gekiga manga by the Japanese comics artist Yoshihiro Tatsumi (1935–2015) as an exemplar of how comics focus on the “centrality of the individual voice as a critical interlocutor”, in Lustiger-

12

Introduction

Thaler’s phrase to trouble modern memory, its apparatuses, and the ongoing role of the past in the present.4 In “Hell” (1971), the reader is plunged into a postapocalyptic Hiroshima where objects and memories are not as they appear. “Hell” describes the reminiscences of a Japanese military photographer by the name of Koyanagi who enters Hiroshima on 6 August 1945 in the immediate aftermath of the atom bomb dropped on the city by the American bomber, the Enola Gay. The city is ruined by the devastating power of the hydrogen bomb, which exploded above the city, killing around 150,000 people, and with a heat so intense that it seared the silhouette of people and objects onto nearby surfaces. In Tatsumi’s words, it was these shadow photographs on which he based his story. As Koyanagi wanders around the devastated city, he is overwhelmed by what he sees; people only half alive as they suffer from radiation burns, a train carriage of passengers turned to corpses, and black rain shedding nuclear fallout. Amidst the destruction, he encounters an image that stops him in his tracks. The heat from the bomb has scorched the image of a son affectionately massaging his mother’s shoulders onto a ruined wall (2008, 18) (Figure 0.3). The panel’s large dimensions and the emanata within the panel convey the impact of this image on Koyanagi. The image has been produced from a perverse photographic event via the flash of the bomb, and Koyanagi’s shocked and tear-stricken face confirms the significance of this image to which he, and the reader, are witness. The second panel consolidates his interpretation of the image – now rendered in solid black as the narrative voice confirms, “[t]wo figures burned into the wall of a home! A parent and child… A devoted son massaging his mother’s back when the bomb annihilated them” (ellipses in original, 18). The shift in the way that the image is encoded – from cross-hatching to black – signifies the solidification of the protagonist’s interpretation. As tears blur his vision, he takes a photograph of the wall, sobbing, “[i]s there no God? How could this have happened?” (19). In this moment, his flawed vision not only represents an outpouring of grief for the catastrophe, but also speaks to an error of interpretation that will permeate the rest of the story. Koyanagi’s camera, a modern apparatus of witnessing, helps confirm his story – its mechanical eye capturing what its owner sees before him, both literally and metaphorically. Visiting the same site three days later, he discovers that the wall has been “torn down”, its absence only serving to confirm his story about “a loving son and mother”. A passerby confirms that the Yamadas – a mother and son – used to live in a nearby apartment. Six years elapse, and Japan signs the 1951 Peace Treaty. To portray this historic signing, Tatsumi changes the visual register from Koyanagi’s cartoonish figuration to a more photo-realistic one as he reproduces a detail from a photograph taken of the-then Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida during his visit to San Francisco to sign the Treaty.5 In Tatsumi’s rendition, Yoshida states “I am one man” as he signs, a reference to the Prime Minister’s “habit of making decisions without consulting others” (Hunter-Chester 2016, 106). The photograph is eventually published, a decision that is historically situated; Koyanagi feels emboldened to sell the photograph to the Sanyo Daily News

Figure 0.3 “Mother and Son”. © Yoshihiro Tatsumi. Used with permission from Drawn & Quarterly Publications.

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Introduction

[Sanyo Shimbun], whose editor explains, “[t]hanks to the Peace Treaty, we can finally publish photos documenting the effects of the bomb” (22), and confirms that the photograph, “will touch the entire nation…no, the entire word” (ellipsis in original, 21). After its publication, the image becomes a celebrated symbol of the hope and resilience of the Japanese people in the face of immense suffering. In time, the photograph constellates Japan’s collective memory as news articles, film, and poems are dedicated to the Yamadas. Soon, a statue replicating the silhouette is erected in honour of mother and son in Hiroshima itself. Koyanagi recalls, “I was high as a kite”, after he is commissioned to lead an anti-nuclear movement called “No More Hiroshima”. His pride displaces the guilt he has been feeling because of the substantial payment received for the sale of the photograph. The text thus portrays the connection between individual and collective expressions of memory, to which Michael Rothberg’s discussion of “collective memory” is relevant as something that is multilayered both because it is highly mediated and because individuals and groups play an active role in rearticulating memory, if never with complete consciousness of unimpeded agency. Competitive scenarios can derive from these restless rearticulations, but so can visions that construct solidarity out of the specificities, overlaps, and echoes of different historical experiences. (2009, 18) Throughout the diegesis, the central image is repeated 13 times, inhabiting layers of meaning in its representation as a photograph, a statue, newspaper articles, as well as in flashbacks, nightmares, and hallucinations. A private past thus functions as a symbol of public commemoration; the image lives up to this task until devastated by the truth of its origin. On a windy evening, Koyanagi is approached by a man claiming to be Yamada, the son long since thought dead from the blast. Yamada tells Koyanagi that the recorded image was not that of a loving embrace, but rather, a “murder scene” (27). He explains that he hired a friend to kill his mother and that it was this action that the bomb unwittingly captured in its “deadly flash” (17). Yamada wants to blackmail Koyanagi, threatening to otherwise reveal the truth of the photograph. Tatsumi stages their conversation in front of the Memorial Cenotaph in Hiroshima Park, where the hollowness of the structure mimics the way that Koyanagi’s story is emptied of its former meaning as its misreading is revealed. As Koyanagi recalls a fragment of the image, complete with its impact aura, he agonises, “[h]ow could that statue represent murder instead of peace?” (31). He soon resolves, “A single bomb killed 200,000 people…what difference would it make then…if there was…one more” (ellipses in original, 35). At their next meeting by the Hiroshima Peace Memorial (Genbaku Dome), he murders Yamada, dumping the body into the adjacent Motosayu River. The devastating shadow of the past leads to its repetition, as Koyanagi, desperate to conceal the truth behind the image, kills the mercenary,

Introduction

15

becoming a murderer himself. After committing the crime, Koyanagi walks to work, discovering the statue toppled in front of the office as the editors have discovered that Yamada was alive. Koyanagi’s story has failed – both at an individual and collective level. As Marita Sturken observes in relation to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park and Coventry Cathedral in England’s West Midlands, “[s]ome of the most effective memorials of World War II, for instance, use the shell of a building, a ruin arrested in its deterioration, to convey the shock of violence and act as a cautionary in the present” (“Aesthetics of Absence” 2004, 316). Indeed, the Genbaku Dome and Memorial Cenotaph retain a prominent visual status throughout the story. Together, they are represented in at least 12 panels, reinforcing the enduring trauma of the atomic explosion in Hiroshima. This is also evident in the way that Tatsumi renders the drawings of the Dome, in particular, in a more photorealist style compared with the other stylistic elements of the mise-en-scène, as evident in Figure 0.4. As Lisa Yoneyama argues, the Dome exceeds the economy of the present sense of time and cannot be circulated within it. Unable to be reoccupied, both physically and metaphysically, the Dome has been derailed from the secular course of history. It has receded into an ahistorical and almost naturalized past. The remoteness of this mnemonic object from commonplace material processes—its inaccessibility, its inhabitability, its out-of-placeness in the everyday urban scene, and its nonfunctionality—confers a certain quality of sacredness and what Benjamin calls cult value to this icon. (1999, 69) The Dome retains these qualities within Tatsumi’s story, unable to be interpolated at the level of the diegesis, it remains photographically remote, a jarring reminder of its materiality beyond the story-world. After the murder, Koyanagi returns to the scene of the crime, now jointly a place of public and personal loss. Counterpoised against the Dome, which occupies more than two-thirds of the panel, Koyanagi contemplates “I saw the hell inside me… and for twenty years…I have been wandering through this hell like a zombie” (ellipses in original, “Hell”, 40) (Figure 0.4). The story’s title thus comes to describe not only the devastation of the bomb, but a description of the narrator’s all-consuming guilt, as the image claims a life – and a death – of its own beyond its initial capture by the photographer’s lens. The popular celebration of the image contradicts its destructive origins and Koyanagi’s own efforts to ensure its secret. The story raises pertinent questions about the ethics of memory and bearing witness, the relevance of multimodality to the promulgation of memory, and at its heart the need for narrative, particularly in times of great trauma. To use Tatsumi’s language, “hell” or catastrophe is not something that remains in the past, but is something that underpins the concept of progress itself, and which is

Figure 0.4 “I saw the hell inside me…”. © Yoshihiro Tatsumi. Used with permission from Drawn & Quarterly Publications.

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17

evident in the logic of the story, recalled repeatedly through the presence of the Genbaku Dome. The story introduces the reader to the possibility of visual archives being produced by different means – through photograph, witness, and hand-drawn images, for example. Rather than framing photography and personal testimonies as presenting competing claims of visual legitimacy, we can wonder about how they converge, as well as present visual information differently, as discussed further in Chapter 5, on Guibert et al.’s The Photographer: Into War-Torn Afghanistan with Doctors Without Borders (2009) and Waltz with Bashir (2009) by Ari Folman and David Polonsky. If traumatic memory is understood as an atomised constellation, existing both within and outside of language, then comics provide an ideal form that respects this atomisation as it collects the fragments or shards of the past without seeking to conjoin them – or obliterate their coding. Marita Sturken’s useful suggestion that cultural memory (to which I would add individual memory) and history are “entangled rather than oppositional”, without failing to recognise that their distinction matters when “memories are asserted specifically outside of or in response to historical narratives” (Tangled Memories 1997, 5), gestures towards the political agency that unsanctioned memories can assert. One can trace the tension between individual, and cultural memories on the one hand and historical narrative to Benjamin’s understanding of historiography such that “[t]o articulate what is past does not mean to recognize ‘how it really was’”, but rather “means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger” (“Theses on the Philosophy of History” 1999[1940]). In this understanding, the past is found within memory, with its uncertainties and pitfalls – a subject of representation rather than History or Truth. That Benjamin’s writing is frequently arranged through aphorisms or fragments that emerge from the white-space of the page, such as in the “Theses on the Philosophy of History” and in One Way Street (1928), speaks to the aesthetics of disruption that would to characterise various modernisms, including contemporary comics, and the interrogation of survival in the face of loss.

Methodology Judith Butler’s opening remarks in Frames of War inform the epistemological orientation of this book, and some of its theoretical concerns: “[i]f certain lives do not qualify as lives or are, from the start, not conceivable as lives within certain epistemological frames, then these lives are never lived nor lost in the full sense” (2010, 1). She continues that “[t]he ‘frames’ that work to differentiate the lives we can apprehend from those we cannot […] not only organize visual experience but also generate specific ontologies of the subject” (x). Whereas Butler’s book is primarily concerned with strategies of representation, this book extends this line of thinking by suggesting that comics and graphic novels offer significant cultural, political, and social value precisely because they allow alternate “ontologies of the subject” to emerge, thereby supplementing (and complicating) the visual archive associated with marginalised subject positions.

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Introduction

As Butler goes on to state, “[t]he frame does not simply exhibit reality, but actively participates in a strategy of containment, selectively producing and enforcing what will count as reality” (xiii). This book demonstrates that comics generate a productive interface between private, public, and archival memories, and the tensions between them are artfully represented through the mechanics of the medium in representing time as space. As Michael Rothberg suggests “[n]ot strictly separable from either history or representation, memory nonetheless captures simultaneously the individual, embodied, and lived and the collective, social, and constructed side of our relations to the past” (emphasis in original 2009, 12). Comics always already mediate meaning through their particular visual strategies so that they invest in the “authentication” of memories, rather than necessarily lay claim to “documentary authenticity” (Huyssen 2003, 130). As the chapters will go on to argue, comics creators utilise the tensions between narrative structure, verisimilitude, performativity, and the formal properties of the medium to produce sophisticated texts that raise questions about the way that visual media such as photography and documentary film construct ‘reality’ within their respective discourses. As Jean Baudrillard argued, in the erosion of the real, [t]here is a proliferation of myths of origin and signs of reality; of secondhand truth, objectivity and authenticity. There is an escalation of the true, of the lived experience; a resurrection of the figurative where the object and substance have disappeared. (quoted in Poster 1988, 171) Comics engage rigorously with this proliferation precisely because as an art form that mediates ‘reality’, they engage with debates about ‘truth’, historiography, and authenticity. Thus, what we see in the chapters ahead is the way that comics utilise multiple registers of signification to say different things about the events at hand (ranging from photo-realistic to cartoon) – which itself connects to the way that memory can be encoded differently depending on the circumstances in which it is constructed in the present as well as the past. Comics promote creative and critical reading practice, as readers can slow down, speed up, and piece together sequential narratives based on their interpretation and reading preferences. Other media enable modulations in time – for example, one can re-read lines in a novel, or re-watch scenes in a film – but a fundamental feature of comics is that they usually present words and images in a static sequence where the act of interpretation takes place by reading across and between words, and images, and where the elements work together to generate meaning. Described as an “art of tensions” by Charles Hatfield (2005, 32), the interdependent gap between the written and visual syntax of comics appends two distinct levels of meaning – literal and metonymic – to the text. Here, I use “interdependent” in accordance with McCloud’s definition, “where words and pictures go hand in hand to convey an idea that neither could convey alone” (1993, 155). In the words of Shaun Tan, whose work, The Arrival (2006), forms one of the subject-texts in Chapter 1,

Introduction

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I often like to think of words and images as opposite points on a battery, creating a potential voltage through a “gap” between telling and showing. It requires the reader’s imagination to complete the circuit. (“Boundaries of Storytelling”) Art Spiegelman offers an analogous explanation to Tan’s on how comics ‘work’, where he suggests that in comics and graphic novels, the story “operates somewhere between the words and the idea that’s in the pictures, and in the movement between the pictures, which is the essence of what happens in a comic” (quoted in Huyssen 2003, 131). This book is written in cognisance of the impact of the “productive inscription of Holocaust discourse” to use Andreas Huyssen’s words (2003, 99). The discussion frames collective and individual memory as being both “multidirectional” (Rothberg) and “entangled” (Sturken, Tangled Memories). Moreover, it is responsive to scientific research into memory, and particularly the classification of memory-types as a scaffold through which to explore the way that comics engage and represent different kinds of memory. Accordingly, I have adopted the terms ‘explicit’ and ‘implicit’ memory, and associated terms, into the discussions that follow. Explicit memories can be divided into two primary types, declarative or semantic memory (also known as autonoetic consciousness (Baddeley et al. 2015, 308), which can be deliberately recalled, and includes ‘basic’ information such as where one attended primary school, for example. The second type of explicit memory is episodic, and which is considered to operate as an interface between declarative memory and implicit memory (Blue Knot Foundation n.d.). Implicit memories on the other hand, are unconscious and non-verbal, and associated with emotions and physical sensations, often elicited by environmental cues, and which includes traumatic memory.6 In Chapter 4, we learn that the production of David Small’s Stitches was provoked by a swelling in his throat, which Small recognised as something that “could kill” him if he did not tend to what his body was articulating. Specifically, he writes that his “buried feelings of impotence and fury at my family had begun to express themselves in my body” (2009, 25). Thus, the act of drawing can act as an interface between conscious and unconscious memories. Comics portray explicit memories, yet are ideally situated to explore implicit memories because of the way that drawing can mine unconscious and somatic memory through its non-verbal forms of representation. Graphic novels promulgate their own analytical and critical terminology. One of the most well known examples in this respect is the notion of “postmemory”, which Marianne Hirsch developed after reading Art Spiegelman’s pioneering graphic novel, Maus (2003). Drawing on the relationship between Artie, the narrator of Maus, and his father – a survivor of Auschwitz – Hirsch defines postmemory as:

20

Introduction the relationship of children of survivors of cultural or collective trauma to the experiences of their parents, experiences that they “remember” only as the narratives and images with which they grew up, but that are so powerful, so monumental, as to constitute memories in their own right. (“Surviving Images” 2001, 9)

Indeed, postmemory is “an intersubjective transgenerational space of remembrance, linked specifically to cultural or collective trauma” (2001, 10). Hirsch continues to explain that “postmemorial viewers do more than listen to the witness [of a trauma]; they gaze at the image with her and thus they can re-enact, recall in the very sensations of the body” (15). Postmemory illustrates the way that grief can dis/connect the individual and the community. Configured in relation to visual documentary, Kraemer highlights the “aesthetic and ethical implications” of representing trauma as once the “traumatic event passes into the period of post-memory, and those who bore witness have passed away, the visual document remains as one of the few ways in which society can still try to understand that which they did not encounter directly themselves” (2015, 58). Andreas Huyssen provides a reading of post-traumatic “beginnings” which is complementary to Hirsch’s formulation of post-memory: “[w]e know that every posttraumatic new beginning bears the traces of traumatic repetition, even though increasing temporal and generational distance from the original experience may alter the discursive structure of the posttraumatic symptom” (2003, 151). It is precisely the “discursive structure[s]” of post-memory that Hirsch uses to distinguish it from first-generation memories, although the forms of representation between the two may overlap. Richard Cándida Smith neatly summarises the tensions inherent in memory archives in the following way, [m]emory exists in an ongoing process of performance and response. Traces of the past otherwise slip into the archive, an ever-present but usually ignored repository filled with the random survivals of antecedent social relationships stored in buildings, landscapes, libraries, museums, store windows, the electronic media, as well as in the everyday lives of the countless unknown people whose paths cross ours. (2002, 16) In the West, modern autobiographical comics find their roots in the American underground comix of the 1970s, as well as in the bandes dessinées (drawn strips) of Franco-Belgian comics. Works such as Justin Green’s Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary, as well as Keiji Nakazawa’s Ore Wa Mita (I Saw It), both published in 1972, offered remarkable accounts of trauma of markedly different orders; Green’s on the vicissitudes of growing up with what came to be diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder, whereas Nakazawa describes the torment of his first-hand encounter with the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. In turn, Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer-Prize winning Maus (2003) utilised the comics format

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to visualise and imagine aspects of his father’s experiences in Auschwitz, and inspired the creation of many independent comics that have since joined the pantheon of autobiographical comics. Gardner suggests that of all modern narrative forms, comics are the most compressed, the most dependent on ellipses and lacunae; comics, that is, must also show and tell only a fraction of the information required to make narrative sense of the information being presented. (2010, 138) The interaction of words and images allows comics creators, and their readers, to imagine spaces within which the impact of trauma can make itself known. In this respect, Rothberg’s concept of “multidirectional memory” as a model that “acknowledges how remembrance both cuts across and binds together diverse spatial, temporal, and cultural sites” (2009, 16) is apparent in comics precisely because of its mode of representation. Representation and Memory in Graphic Novels focusses on the multitude of ways comics portray minority and occluded voices that encourage readers to understand perspectives that have traditionally been marginalised in mainstream Western media. Perhaps one of the most important aspects of this representation is that the modes of representation are frequently unorthodox and divergent. Each of the texts represents memory through different visual techniques – ink washes, sepia, monochrome, foxing – and some, such as The Photographer and Waltz with Bashir, incorporate other visual media to tell their stories. Comics offer a rich field from which to shape, process, and ‘materialise’ trauma narratives because of the medium’s ability to hold and represent narrative complexity.7 Each of the following chapters pays attention to the representation of different types of memory through divergent visual techniques and strategies to explore what each of these texts uncovers about memory and its infinite iterations. From migration and ‘unbelonging’ (Chapters 1 and 2), to revolution and war (Chapter 3), bodily trauma (Chapter 4), documenting war (Chapter 5), and indefinite detention (Chapter 6), the texts under consideration furnish a wealth of evidence about how difficult and traumatic memories can find expression through a variety of registers (symbolic, photographic, iconic, verbal, and indexical). This creative intimacy is a useful tool within events that might have otherwise been silenced or dismissed can be productively reimagined through the tension generated between word and image.

Notes 1 Campbell’s grandfather, Ladislav Szoke, was born in Hungary and served as a soldier in World War II before working on the Snowy Mountain Scheme as a migrant. Campbell notes that he designed his story to be read in web browser so that “everyone across the globe could read it”, but goes on to note that “it dawned on [him] that in a few years the browser would be updated so many times that the story may not even work anymore”. He concludes by asking the reader, “if you get the chance to read this, please do your best to remember” (Campbell).

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2 McCloud discusses the concept of ‘closure’ on page 63 of Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. 3 As an example of the far-reaching impact of this event, the poet H.D. [Hilda Doolittle] believed that it was the news of the ship’s sinking that caused her to have a stillbirth. 4 Tatsumi’s story is based on a photograph that he purchased through the “Associated Press or United Press International” (“Q&A with Yoshihiro Tatsumi” 2008). In another interview, Tatsumi explained that more than a decade after the war with the USA, life in Japan was difficult, with many people left without gainful employment (“Just Visiting”). Against the backdrop of economic and social privation, Tatsumi developed his particular style of manga, which would come to be known as gekiga or ‘dramatic pictures’. Tatsumi himself described the approach underpinning this aesthetic form as a broad expression of “what it means to be a human being, the joy and the sadness” (“Just Visiting”). 5 The Peace Treaty with Japan was signed by 48 countries in September 1951, and came into effect in April 1952, functioning as a bilateral agreement imposing restrictions on both Japanese and Allied forces, as well as terminating Japan’s status as an imperial power. 6 The second category of implicit memory is procedural memory that concerns “motor actions, hardwired emergency responses” and the like (Blue Knot Foundation n.d.). 7 For further discussion on the concept of “materialising”, see Chute Disaster Drawn, p. 25.

Bibliography Baddeley, Alan, Michael W. Eysenck and Michael C. Anderson. Memory. Second Edition. London and New York: Psychology Press, 2015. Print. Bartlett, Frederic. Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Print. Baudrillard, Jean. Selected Writings. Ed. Mark Poster. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988. Print. Benjamin, Walter. One-Way Street and Other Writings. Trans. J.A. Underwood. London: Penguin Classics, 2009 [1928]. Print. Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History” [1940], in Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zorn. London: Pimlico, 1999: 245–255. Print. Benjamin, Walter. Walter Benjamin: 1938-1940 v. 4: Selected Writings. Trans. Howard Eiland. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. Print. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Print. Blue Knot Foundation. “Fact Sheet on Memory: The Truth of Memory and the Memory of Truth”. https://www.blueknot.org.au. n.d. Accessed 20 January 2018. Web. Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?New York: Verso, 2010. Print. Campbell, Stuart [Sutu]. “These Memories Won’t Last”. memories.sutueatsflies.com. Chute, Hillary. Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form, Cambridge and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016. Print. Chute, Hillary and Marianne DeKoven. “Introduction: Graphic Narrative”. MFS Modern Fiction Studies 52. 4(2006): 767–782. Print. Erll, Astrid and Ann Rigney (eds). Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2009. Print. Freud, et al. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 5 (1900–1901), ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’ (Second Part) and ‘On Dreams’. Hogarth and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1953.

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Gardner, Jared. “Same Difference: Graphic Alterity in the Work of Gene Luen Yang, Adrian Tomine, and Derek Kirk Kim”, in Multicultural Comics: From Zap to Blue Beetle. Ed. Frederick Luis Aldama. Austin, TX: The University of Texas Press, 2010: 132–147. Print. Gardner, Jared. Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First-Century Storytelling. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012. Print Giddens, Thomas. “Comics, Law, and Aesthetics: Towards the Use of Graphic Fictions in Legal Studies”. Law and Humanities 6. 1(2012): 85–109. Print. Gilmore, Leigh and Elizabeth Marshall. “Trauma and Young Adult Literature: Representing adolescence and knowledge in David Small’s Stitches: A Memoir”. Prose Studies 35. 1(2013): 16–38. doi:10.1080/01440357.2013.781345. Green, Justin. Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary. San Francisco, CA: McSweeney’s, 2009 [1972]. Print. Hatfield, Charles. Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature, Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 2005. Print. Hirsch, Marianne. “Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory”. The Yale Journal of Criticism 14. 1(2001): 5–37. Print. “How Are Memories Formed?” BBC Radio, 2016. Radio. Hunter-Chester, David. Creating Japan’s Ground Self-Defense Force, 1945–2015: A Sword Well Made. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016. Print. Huyssen, Andreas. Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. Kraemer, Joseph A. “Waltz with Bashir (2008): Trauma and Representation in the Animated Documentary”. Journal of Film and Video 67. 3–4(2015): 57–68. Print. Lustiger-Thaler, Henri. “Memory Redux”. Current Sociology Review 61. 5–6(2013): 906–927. Print. Magnussen, Anne and Hans-Christian Christiansen. Analytical and Theoretical Approaches to Comics. Njalsgade, Copenhagen: Museum Tuscalanum Press, 2000. Print. McCay, Winsor. “Little Sammy Sneeze”. New York Herald. 24 July 1904 – December 9 1906. Print. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: Kitchen Sink Press, 1993. Print. Mitchell, W.J.T. What do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2004. Print. Nakazawa, Keiji. I Saw It. San Francisco, CA: EduComics. 1982. Original published as Ore wa Mita. Translated by Project Gen, Tokyo, 1972–1973. Print. Passerini, Luisa. “Response on Borders, Conflict Zones, and Memory”. Women’s History Review 25. 3(2016): 447–457. Print. Pizzino, Christopher. “The Doctor versus the Dagger: Comics Reading and Cultural Memory”. PMLA 130. 3(2015): 631–647. Print. Rickman, Lance. “Bande dessinée and the Cinematograph: Visual Narrative in 1895”. European Comic Art 1. 1(2008): 1–19. Print. Roe, Annabelle Honess. Animated Documentary. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Print. Roediger, Henry and James Wertsch. “Creating a New Discipline of Memory Studies”. Memory Studies 1. 1(2008): 9–22. Print. Rothberg, Michael. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009. Print.

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Rydberg, Jenny Ann. “Research and Clinical Issues in Trauma and Dissociation: Ethical and Logical Fallacies, Myths, Misreports, and Misrepresentations”. European Journal of Trauma and Dissociation 1. 2(2017): 89–99. Print. Said, Edward. “Homage to Joe Sacco”. Introduction in Palestine by Joe Sacco. London: Jonathan Cape, 2003: i–v. Print. Small, David. “Why I Write”. Publishers Weekly (August 31, 2009): 23–25. Print. Smith, Andy. “The Ephemeral Nature of Everything: A Conversation with Art Spiegelman”. International Journal of Comic Art 12. 1(2010): 401–409. Print. Smith, Greg M. “Comics in the Intersecting Histories of the Window, the Frame, and the Panel”, in From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels: Contributions to the Theory and History of Graphic Narrative. Eds Daniel Stein and Jan-Noel Thon. Second Edition. Berlin and Boston, MA: De Gruyter, 2015. Print. Smith, Richard Cándida (ed.). Art and the Performance of Memory: Sounds and Gestures of Recollection. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2002. Print. Smith, Sidonie. “Human Rights and Comics: Autobiographical Avatars, Crisis Witnessing, and Transnational Rescue Networks”, in Graphic Subjects: Critical Essays on Autobiography and Graphic Novels. Ed. Michael Chaney. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011: 61–72. Print. Spiegelman, Art. Maus. London: Penguin 2003. Print. Sturken, Marita. Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997. Print. Sturken, Marita. “The Aesthetics of Absence: Rebuilding Ground Zero”. American Ethnologist 31. 3(2004): 311–325. Print. Tamm, Marek. “History as Cultural Memory: Mnemohistory and the Construction of the Estonian Nation”. Journal of Baltic Studies 39. 4(2008): 499–516. Print. Tatsumi, Yoshihiro. “Just Visiting: Manga Artist Yoshihiro Tatsumi”. Interview by San Grewal. thestar.com. 9 May 2009. Accessed 20 May 2018. Web. Tatsumi, Yoshihiro. “Hell”, in Good-bye. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly Publications, 2008. Print. Tatsumi, Yoshihiro. “Q&A with Yoshihiro Tatsumi”. Interview by Adrian Tomine in Good-bye. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly Publications, 2008. Print. Telotte, J.P. Animating Space: From Mickey to WALL-E. Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 2010. Print. Wells, Paul. Understanding Animation. London and New York: Routledge, 1998. Print. Wertheimer, Max. On Perceived Motion and Figural Organization. Ed. Lothar Spillmann. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2012. Print.Yoneyama, Lisa. Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory. Oakland CA: University of California Press, 1999. Print.

Further reading Chaney, Michael A. (ed.). Graphic Subjects. Critical Essays on Autobiography and Graphic Novels. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011. Print. Chute, Hillary. Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. Print. Crawley, Karen and Honni van Rijswijk. “Justice in the Gutter: Representing Everyday Trauma in the Graphic Novels of Art Spiegelman”. Law Text Culture 16. 1(2012): 93–118. Print.

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Erll, Astrid and Ansgar Nünning (eds). Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co., 2008. Print. Ewence, Hannah. “Memories of Suburbia: Autobiographical Fiction and Minority Narratives”, in Memory and History: A Guide to Working with Memory as Source and Subject. Ed. J. Tumblety. New York and London: Routledge, 2013: 160–176. Print. Gibson, Mel. Remembered Reading: Memory, Comics and Post-War Constructions of British Girlhood. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2015. Print. Goodrich, Peter. “Screening the Law”. Law and Literature 21. 1(2009): 1–23. Print. Haverkamp, Anselm. “The Memory of Pictures: Roland Barthes and Augustine on Photography”. Comparative Literature 45. 3(1993): 258–279. Print. Hirsch, Marianne. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Print. Hirsch, Marianne. “Family Pictures: Maus, Mourning, and Post-Memory”. Discourse 15. 2(1992): 3–29. Print. Hirsch, Marianne. “Mourning and Postmemory”, in Graphic Subjects: Critical Essays on Autobiography and Graphic Novels. Ed. Michael Chaney. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011: 17–44. Print. Hirsch, Marianne and Leo Spitzer. “Testimonial Objects: Memory, Gender and Transmission”. Poetics Today 27. 2(2006): 353–383. Print. Hirsch, Marianne and Valerie Smith. “Feminism and Cultural Memory: An Introduction”. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28. 1(2002): 1–19. Print. Hodgkin, Katharine and Susannah Radstone (eds). Regimes of Memory. London: Routledge, 2003. Print. Hogarth, William. “A Harlot’s Progress”. Ed. Sean Shesgreen. Engravings by Hogarth. New York: Dover Publications. Sections 18–23. Print. Horsman, Yasco. Theatres of Justice: Judging, Staging and Working Through in Arendt, Brecht, and Delbo. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011. Print. Kuhn, Annette. “Memory Texts and Memory Work: Performances of Memory in and with Visual Media”. Memory Studies 3. 4(2010): 298–313. Print. Kuhn, Annette and Kirsten Emiko McAllister (eds). Locating Memory: Photographic Arts. New York: Berghahn Books, 2006. Print. Merino, Ana. “Memory in Comics: Testimonial, Autobiographical and Historical Space in MAUS”. Transatlantica 1(2010): 1–12. Print. Mickwitz, Nina. Documentary Comics: Graphic Truth Telling in a Sceptical Age. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Print. Mitchell, W.J.T. “Comics as Media: Afterword” Critical Inquiry 40. 3(2014): 255–265. Print. Nora, Pierre. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire”. Representations 26(1989): 7–24. Print. Pepin-Wakefield, Yvonne. “Colouring in the Blanks: Memory Drawings of the 1990 Kuwait Invasion”. Jade 28. 3(2009): 309–318. Print. Radstone, Susannah (ed.). Memory and Methodology. Oxford: Berg, 2000. Print. Rossington, Michael and Anne Whitehead (eds). Theories of Memory: A Reader. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. Print. Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood. Translated by Anjali Singh. New York: Pantheon, 2003. Print. Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return. Translated by L’Association. New York: Pantheon, 2004. Print. Small, David. Stitches: A Memoir. New York: W. W. Norton, 2009. Print.

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Spargo, R. Clifton. The Ethics of Mourning: Grief and Responsibility in Elegiac Literature. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. Print. Spargo, R. Clifton. Vigilant Memory: Emmanuel Lévinas, the Holocaust and the Unjust Death. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. Print. Suleiman, Susan Rubin. “The Edge of Memory: Literary Innovation and Childhood Trauma”, in The Future of Memory. Eds Richard Crownshaw, Jane Kilby and Antony Rowland. New York: Berghahn, 2010: 93–109. Print. Tan, Shaun. “Shaun Tan Breaks Down the Boundaries of Storytelling”. http://www. alma.se/en/award-winners/2011-Recipient/More-about-XXX/. Web. Accessed 4 March 2017. Tatsumi, Yoshihiro. “Yoshihiro Tatsumi Interview”. Interview by Gary Groth. The Comics Journal. 10 March 2015. Accessed 20 May 2018. Web. Tran, GB. Vietnamerica: A Family’s Journey. New York: Random House, 2011. Print. Trieb, Marc (ed.). Spatial Recall: Memory in Architecture and Landscape. New York: Routledge, 2009. Print. Whitlock, Gillian. “Autographics: The Seeing ‘I’ of Comics”. Modern Fiction Studies 52. 4(2006): 965–979. Print. Whitlock, Gillian. Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2007. Print. Winter, Jay. Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Print. Yaeger, Patricia. “Rubble as Archive, or 9/11 as Dust, Debris, and Bodily Vanishing”, in Trauma at Home After 9/11. Ed. Judith Greenberg. Lincoln, NE and London: University of Nebraska, 2003: 187–194. Print. Young, James E. The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1993. Print.

1

Migrant memories in Henry Yoshitaka Kiyama’s The Four Immigrants Manga and The Arrival by Shaun Tan

Introduction Henry Yoshitaka Kiyama’s The Four Immigrants Manga: A Japanese Experience in San Francisco, 1904–1924 [Manga Yonin Shosei] (1999 [1931]) and Shaun Tan’s The Arrival (2006) illustrate the challenges and promises of migration through diverse visual techniques. The texts were produced in vastly different contexts, indeed in different centuries, but are united in their exploration of the significance of migration in relation to language, the body, and affect, and collective and individual memories. Their respective creators experiment with visual and verbal modes of signification, two elements fundamental to the record and representation of memory. Both texts have received theatrical treatment; The Arrival has been adapted into stage performances by Tamasha/Circus Space (2013), Spare Parts Puppet Theatre (2012/17), Red Leap Theatre (2013) while TheatreWorks Silicon Valley created a musical called The Four Immigrants: An American Musical Manga in 2017. The restaging of these texts illuminates the ways in which diverse aspects of migration, its lived experiences and legal, historical, and practical implications, can be enlivened anew and reinterpreted. The adaptations of Kiyama’s text signify the incorporation of the migrant narrative into dominant American culture. From a ‘Japanese experience’ to an ‘American musical manga’, the change in titles not only suggests a merging of what were ‘other’ experiences into broader imaginary of the United States, but also assumes familiarity with the term ‘manga’, which speaks of the popularity and transnational influence of manga in the United States and worldwide. This chapter focusses not only on the representation of memories of migration, but the way in which memories of the past migrate through time, acquiring diverse inflections through their material re-construction. Through a discussion of their haptic and mechanical properties, the analysis elucidates how comics have provided a significant forum in which ideas about belonging, memory, and experientiality are tested, and through which visual testimony is borne. This is of particular importance given the prevalence of migration in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and the way that discourses on these movements frequently provoke anxieties about financial security and cultural identification at the level of community and the nation-state. Readers may be familiar with the

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way that some media outlets reify the status of migrants and refugees so that the particularities of their circumstances are lost within narratives that play on fears about difference. Against this ossification, comics help explore difference through narratives that frequently focus on the personal and the particular as a political mode of engagement. Indeed, the tensions that comics sustain between word and image act as a highly productive analogue to the strain, ambiguity, and misunderstandings that can permeate lived experiences of migration. These multiple narrative registers – verbal, visual, and spatial – can effectively mimic the disorientation, misunderstandings, and humour that emerge when confronting the unknown in processes such as migration.

Four Immigrants Manga A relatively little-studied comic from 1931, The Four Immigrants Manga: A Japanese Experience in San Francisco, 1904–1924 by Henry Yoshitaka Kiyama, demonstrates the power of comics to capture and convey the complexity of migrant memories. In February 1927, Kiyama exhibited his comics sketches at the Golden Gate Institute in San Francisco (Kinmon Gakuen – a Japanese language school) under the title Manga Hokubei Iminshi (“A Manga North American Immigrant History”). The exhibition proved popular, comprised of 52 episodes that Kiyama would go on to self-publish as “Manga Yonin Shosei” or “The Four Students Comic” in 1931. The comic was printed in Japan, and Kiyama brought a few copies back to San Francisco four years later. It was not until Frederik L. Schodt located a copy in a University of California library in 1980, translated the text, and eventually published it through Stone Bridge Press in 1999 as The Four Immigrants Manga, that the work became available to a wider readership in the West. Thanks to these efforts, readers now have access to what Schodt posits as potentially the first American graphic novel (“Was the first”).1 While this status remains uncertain, The Four Immigrants Manga is an extraordinary text that operates as a proto-memoir to the later long-form graphic novels that would not gain dominance until around 40 years hence in the work of Justin Green (1960s) and Art Spiegelman (1970s) in the USA, and in the work of Japanese artist Keiji Nakazawa in the 1970s, among others. The work thus stands as a landmark exploration of transnational migrant memories through its visual and verbal record of issei (first generation Japanese immigrants to the United States and Canada) experiences in San Francisco. Described as a ‘documentary’ comic book, The Four Immigrants Manga depicts the misadventures of four young issei in San Francisco, who adopt the names Henry, Fred, Frank, and Charlie, upon their arrival to the city in 1904. Through Kiyama’s pen, the episodes provide a unique vantage point on historical events such as the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906 (and a visit to the city by Dr Fusakichi Omori, a famous seismologist, in the quake’s aftermath); the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition; the arrival of Japanese migrants from Hawaii; as well as socio-cultural phenomena such as

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the popularity of so-called ‘picture brides’, and the rise of the Asiatic Exclusion League, which advocated the segregation of all ‘Asian’ children in San Francisco schools. At the time of its publication in Japan, the Japanese consul general (1930–1933) Kaname Wakasugi’s introductory remarks to The Four Immigrants Manga are illuminating; “[o]ur lives as Japanese in America have a unique historical significance eminently worthy of study” (27). Indeed, the episodes powerfully convey the affective dimensions of these historical events, located in their broader socio-political contexts, embodied through the eyes, bodies, and language of the four protagonists as they interact with other characters, places, and spaces. The stories draw directly Kiyama’s experiences in San Francisco as he migrated to the United States in 1904. The character of Henry is closest to the author’s avatar, and like Kiyama, studies art at what was then the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art before it was rebuilt as the San Francisco Institute of Art in the aftermath of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake. Kiyama would go on to win several awards, particularly for life drawing, as well as a scholarship from the New York Art Students League (Schodt in Kiyama 1999, 10), before returning to settle permanently in Japan in 1924. In its style and visual lexicon, The Four Immigrants Manga demonstrates an ongoing transnational connectivity between US and Japanese comics readerships and influences. From the 1920s, domestic weekly pictorial magazines in Japan such as Asahi Graph (1923–2000) began to serialise comics such as George McManus’s Bringing Up Father (1913–2000). A few decades later, strips such as Polly and Her Pals (1925–1927) by Cliff Sterrett, Fred Hopper’s Happy Hooligan (1900–1932), and cartoons such as Felix the Cat (1919) by Pat Sullivan were also popularly received in Japan. Frederik Schodt draws attention to observations by Japanese artists such as Ippei Okamoto (1886–1948), who were largely responsible for introducing American comics to the Japanese market. For example, Okamoto explained that “[t]he American people love to laugh”, and that “their laugh is an innocent one, that instantly dispels fatigue” (Koyama-Richard 2008, 43). Readers of The Four Immigrants Manga can perhaps identify a similar sentiment at play in the comedic style of Kiyama’s story, where he combines the pacing of American gag strips with Japanese word play and cultural memories. This particular affective circuitry is emphasised through the structure of the comic, in which the episodes, although of varying length, usually conclude with a visual or verbal gag. At times, characters fall out of bed while dreaming at the end of an episode, in a style reminiscent of McCay’s Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend (1904–1925) and Little Nemo in Slumberland (1905–1926). Kiyama deliberately engaged with and explored American comic strips, particularly the ‘Sunday funnies’, incorporating their visual and stylistic cues into his aesthetic style. The episodes in The Four Immigrants Manga privilege humour, even when exploring the difficult economic, social, and political circumstances in which the characters frequently find themselves – an impulse that Chapter 4 on Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis explores further.

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As an artist, Kiyama had a diverse and varied visual style, incorporating influences from comics and cinema into his work. For example, in one sequence from The Four Immigrants Manga, Henry follows a woman down the street, thinking that she is a Japanese woman he has been courting. When she eventually turns around, he is shocked that she is black. As Richard von Busack notes, this is a direct adaptation of the same scene portrayed in the Buster Keaton silent comedy, Seven Chances (1925).2 Kiyama’s portrayal of African Americans in the comic deliberately mimics popular caricatures published in newspapers and magazines of the time, a strategy that provides a clue as to Kiyama’s interest in exploring the particularities of form and representation across different mediums. As Kom Kunyosying notes, there is a stark difference in this mode of representation compared with the approach that Kiyama adopted in his oil painting, which demonstrates a particular sensitivity in the portrait of an unnamed African-American man (2011, 52–53). The presentation of street scenes, character dress, and appearance are also notable for the way that they mimic the streetscapes and fashions in films such as Safety Last! (1923) and Speedy (1928), both featuring the silent film star Harold Lloyd. Kiyama’s incorporation of multiple cultural forms within the text demonstrates the ability of comics to reflect, parody, and contribute to the formation of cultural archives, leading to what Groensteen terms the “semantic enrichment” of comics (2007, 147). The multiplicity of form and content, and the ways in which they abrade one another in clear and surprising ways is, I contend, analogous to the operation of memory itself. Kiyama could turn his hand to various artistic styles. Frederik Schodt comments that “[m]any of Kiyama’s works survive today and are occasionally exhibited in the Yonago City Art Museum in Tottori Prefecture”, adding that he has a “considerable reputation in the area of his birth, not as a cartoonist, but as an example of an early local artist who mastered Western art techniques” (jai2. com). In this respect, Kiyama is a transnational artist, whose multidirectional practice of borrowing elements from Western art styles can be located within a longer tradition of artistic exchanges between Japan and the West, exemplified in the work of Hokusai (1760–1849), whose woodcut prints (Ukiyo-e) helped generate the movement known as Japonisme after European trade resumed with Japan in the 1850s, and which in turn had a profound impact on the development of impressionism, the aesthetic movement, and Art Noveau (Tate Modern). In the twentieth century, Osamu Tezuka’s (1928–1989) manga and anime, respectively, demonstrate the ongoing influence of Disney [and particularly films such as Bambi (1942), which Tezuka adapted into comic book form in 1951], and whose artistic legacy has also had a significant impact in Western comics cultures. One of the innovations of Kiyama’s comic is that it was written as a bilingual text – specifically in English and Meiji-era Japanese. Kiyama rendered the ‘foreign’ words and sounds in broken English to distinguish them from the lines of fluent Japanese dialogue. This technique allows Kiyama to literally draw attention to the heteroglossic environment in which the characters find

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themselves, creating a vivid sense of the cultural perturbations in early-twentieth century San Francisco. The wavy, attenuated line of Kiyama’s lettering indicates the four protagonists’ uncertain entry into a new and unfamiliar culture. The Western names they adopt following their arrival in the United States – Charlie, Frank, Henry, and Fred – are also hand-lettered, which produces, as a haptic graphology, the impression that the names are being sounded out in a similar way to the testing of their new environments. The record of these migrant memories is thus ‘materialised’, to use Art Spiegelman’s term, through the variety of lexical contours that distinguish the various domains in, and through which, the characters move. In Schodt’s translation, the Japanese spoken between the friends is rendered in typeset English, while their interactions with non-Japanese speakers retain Kiyama’s hand-lettered English transcriptions. In the original, Kiyama hand lettered speech in both English (in the protagonists’ dialogue with non-Japanese characters) and Japanese (as they speak among themselves). As Schodt notes, this reveals Kiyama’s poor business acumen; the original text would have found only a limited potential market because readers would have needed to be fluent in Japanese, and possess considerable knowledge of English. Schodt goes on to note that contemporary Japanese readers also find the original language version difficult to read because of the changes to the language over time.3 Nonetheless, this feature allowed Kiyama to incorporate not only the protagonists’ limited English in their spoken expression and comprehension, but to generate much of the text’s humour and impact through the gaps, silences, and misunderstandings generated through the interplay between word and image. These features are evident in the book’s opening episode, “Arrival in San Francisco”, which commences with Henry, Fred, Frank, and Charlie’s arrival to the city, where Frank and Charlie are immediately diagnosed with “bad eye” (sic) and sent to Angel Island in San Francisco Bay – across from Alcatraz – for processing (Figure 1.1).4 As Schodt observes, the island was notorious for the extended detention periods that migrants faced of up to two to three years, the vast majority of which were Chinese, but also included Mexican and Russian immigrants. He adds that although most of the book’s episodes are highly documentary, Kiyama would have invented this arrival to the Island, as the Station opened on 21 January 1910, six years after his arrival to San Francisco in 1904.5 Jeff Wallenfeldt notes that the Angel Island Immigration Station specifically “employed discriminatory policies that were used to prevent Asians from immigrating […] Passengers arriving in San Francisco were screened aboard ship and separated by nationality” with individuals from other Asiatic backgrounds transported to Angel Island. Moreover, a diagnosis of ‘bad eyes’ because of infectious diseases such as trachoma could lead to migrants being detained and deported back to Japan (Kiyama 135). Kiyama launches his story on the Island pier, whose white railings are visible in the opening two panels (Figure 1.2).

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Figure 1.1 “U.S. Immigration Station, Angel Island, San Francisco Bay, View Showing Wharf and Main Building, 1910”. National Archives, Washington, D.C.

In the second panel, Frank’s tears signify the stress of being held for processing. The third panel depicts Charlie comforting a still tearful Frank, as he explains, “Don’t worry…we’re from Imperial Japan. There’s a consulate here. We’ve been sent to this island for a check because they care. We’ll be free soon!” (emphases in original, 30). Charlie’s emphasis on the word Japan highlights the specificities attached to this background, against the amorphous classification of ‘Asiatic’. In this panel, the men stand behind a wire fence, from which their speech balloons emerge. Frank’s somewhat naive response to this position is “I hate this fence, but at least it keeps out the robbers”, a statement that ironically anticipates the discrimination that many Japanese migrants would face in the United States – and foregrounds later episodes in the comic such as “The Turlock Incident”. In the next panel, Charlie finds a poem engraved into the Station’s walls, stating, “Wow… a Chinaman was here three years!” (emphases in original, 30) (Figure 1.2). Kiyama’s depiction of the poetry clearly correlates with archival photographs from Angel Island, as well as the fears captured in these inscriptions.6 As Lai et al. note, detainees on the Island issued the first petition regarding mistreatment “only a few days after the station opened in 1910” (1999, 17). The specific reference to “Chinaman” in Charlie’s statement is important; the Chinese Exclusion Act had come into operation in 1882, which heralded a new era of discrimination levelled particularly at Chinese migrants, a subject explored further in Chapter 2.

Figure 1.2 “Arrival in San Francisco”. The Four Immigrants Manga: A Japanese Experience in San Francisco, 1904–1924 by Henry (Yoshitaka) Kiyama, translated by Frederik L. Schodt, p. 30. © Estate of Yoshitaka Kiyama, Frederik L. Schodt. Used with permission of Stone Bridge Press, Berkeley, California.

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By inscribing these archives of migrant poetry into his comic, Kiyama contributes to the creation of cultural memories regarding the conditions endured by migrants to the USA in the first half of the twentieth century. Upon their release, Charlie frets that no-one will be able to understand his English as he slumps on a rucksack on the pier. The curvature of his body clearly demonstrates his ongoing worry and concern. Some time later, the four protagonists are reunited as they dine with a representative from a local Buddhist church. Over four panels, they take turns introducing themselves and their aims in migrating to the United States. For example, while Henry somewhat hesitantly describes his desire to study art, “to eventually contribute to the art world back home in Asia”, Fred is more strident in his ambition to become a successful potato farmer. Frank seeks to become rich by working as an importer, and Charlie, “tired of Japan’s old ways”, wishes to “study the democratic systems of this republic” (31). Kiyama thus introduces a multiplicity of immigrant perspectives from the outset of the book. Utilising the capacity of comics to selectively convey information through the arrangement of the panels, readers can simultaneously observe the characters through their individual desires, while literally having an eye on their collective presence. The panels convey a ‘circular’ motion around the table as the characters introduce themselves, a sequence the final episode repeats as Frank and Charlie prepare to return to Japan. This sequence is also notable for the way that Kiyama depicts Chinese characters sitting at adjacent tables (panel 8), or serving food (panel 10). In the latter, a Chinese waiter pokes fun at Charlie’s declamation as he offers an aside that Charlie is talking too much, a statement that Kiyama renders in a phoneticised broken English. The artist clearly delineates between Chinese and Japanese identities – a difference that tended to be obscured by immigration discourses of the day that grouped these and other identities together as broadly ‘Asiatic’, ‘Oriental’, or ‘Mongolian’ (Ichioka, The Issei 1998, 192). Moreover, Ichioka notes that the Japanese “felt indignant and insulted whenever they were lumped together with the Chinese because their own self-image set them distinctly apart” (192). This attitude is evident in The Four Immigrants Manga, which instates a noticeable hierarchy within its depictions of migrants from different nationalities and economic backgrounds. Thus from the opening episode of the book, the heteroglossia of the text is already apparent, and much like the protagonists, the reader must navigate between the English translation of Japanese, and transliterations of English and Chinese. Kiyama captures a form of visual archive that inscribes the play between the languages present in the California of his day. Equipped with this understanding, the reader now accompanies the characters through the episodes that paint a lively and detailed picture of first wave Japanese migration to the USA and that actively narrate against a homogenisation of migrant identities. From the outset of the story, the reader is aware of the adjustment the four protagonists have made in their move to the United States; they adopt Western-style dress and Anglophone names as part of their transition.7 At the same time, they are proud of their cultural heritage, saluting Imperial

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Japan (31) and their individual achievements. For example, at the opening of Episode 4 “Schoolboys”, Frank informs a labour officer that he is a “top Ko-do-kan judo school graduate”, a reference to a school that remains at the epicentre of the judo community in Japan.8 Throughout the episodes, the characters fear entering into servitude, and this repetition serves to remind the reader about the tough working conditions migrants faced with regard to economic strictures and discriminatory practices. Yuji Ichioka’s observations about lived experiences of schoolboys as “comic” where, for example, the difficulties of executing unfamiliar chores were compounded by the “inability to comprehend enough English to follow instructions” (The Issei 1998, 24), directly reflect the experiences in Kiyama’s story.9 The experiences of his characters are testament to this reality across all of the “Schoolboys” episodes (1–6), which depict the characters struggling to understand and maintain their menial jobs. Throughout The Four Immigrants Manga, Kiyama depicts memories of racism against Japanese migrants. For example, in Episode 15, “Mistaken Identity”, Charlie quits his job to look for work in the country, leaving his employer to look for a replacement. She encounters a Chinese man in the street, but mistakes him for Japanese, asking, “How can I find out which is Jap boy or China man?” (sic). The man responds laughingly, “Look see all same. Ha! Ha! Me show you one by and by” (51), and in the next panel he identifies a Japanese man, who Kiyama clearly differentiates through a few strokes of his pen. Kiyama invests the Chinese character with the capacity to respond with a knowing humour to the woman’s inability to distinguish between individuals from Japanese and Chinese backgrounds. The woman adds insult to injury as she calls the Japanese man over (who she derisively calls ‘Charlie’, which Kiyama transcribes as “Charie”), to inform him that he is “a nice clean looking Jap boy” and asks him to work for her. In the penultimate panel, he replies with an annoyed expression that he is in fact a “consul of [the Japanese] Empire”, as he holds onto the lapels of his jacket.10 Yet, even this information fails to make an impression, and the reader is privy to the power differential that persists between the two characters as the woman announces, “[b]ut your looks like my laundry boy” (sic). She stalks off, holding her head at almost 90 degrees to her body, so that her posture signifies her dismissive demeanour. Here, the reader is left in an empathic relationship to the consul; in response to her statement, he falls back onto the pavement, his hat flying off his head, and with an inverted exclamation mark above. His frown has deepened, and his downturned mouth leaves no doubt as to the shock of the woman’s disregard. The incorporation of the exclamation mark highlights the text’s shift into a more cartoonish model of discourse, anticipating the representation of experiential diversity in works such as Masamune Shirow’s Appleseed (1985–1989) or René Pepo Rios’ Condorito (1949–1993), both of which incorporate multiple visual styles into their respective narratives.

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Overleaf, Episode 2 starts with a hopeful start to the characters’ ongoing search for gainful employment, a trajectory overwhelmingly shaped by painfully comedic miscommunications between the protagonists and their employers. The episode foregrounds their repeated misunderstandings; after breaking several dishes and failing to cook a meal, Charlie is dismissed from his job as a kitchen hand for a local family. The reader observes him utilise what is presumably a pocket translation dictionary in panel 8 as he interprets his employer’s instructions, but to little avail. Kiyama has earlier earmarked the importance of the dictionary in the fourth panel where we see it poking out of Charlie’s back pocket as he meets his employer. Later, Henry will call the characters’ repeated dismissals “that old Go Home routine” (emphasis in original 41), which maps a vaudevillian repetition onto these sequences. Kiyama’s use of a bold font accentuates the import of the statement – the men’s survival in their new setting is entirely contingent on their ability to secure employment. The emboldened type face is also significant because of the way that the phrase not only indicates a practical dismissal, but also refers to the anti-immigration sentiment that was steadily gaining ground during the early 1900s against the Japanese, following on from its iteration against the Chinese (Azuma 2005; Duus and Hasegawa 2011; Ichioka 2006). The emphasis in “Go Home” thereby captures these varied registers of narrative meaning through its graphic signage. In Episode 30, “A Visit from the President”, Kiyama uses pictograms for a distinctive narrative purpose. In this episode, Frank and Charlie watch a parade in San Francisco city in honour of President William Taft, on 13 October 1911, but are unable to see past the spectators, who are mostly taller than them (Figure 1.3). Kiyama depicts the men standing behind the crowd, commenting on what they can see. Here, the artist plays a trick on the reader; although the characters can see the parade by peering through the arms and legs of the spectators, the reader cannot, so Kiyama uses their speech balloons to combine words and images as a sub-narrative. Specifically, Kiyama uses Charlie to focalise the scene before him (“Here’s the marching band”) while placing pictographs in Frank’s ‘speech’ balloon of the marching band, soldiers, the formal procession, and vice versa (89). In the panels that span the middle of the page, the characters anticipate catching a glimpse of the President as other members of the procession pass by. For example, as Frank asks, “Think he’s the president?”, a pictograph of a seated man in an open car accompanies the query. Charlie replies, “Doesn’t look like the pictures in the paper […] Maybe the president’s next”. The next panel confirms the arrival of the President through another pictograph, along with Charlie’s quip about his “presidential size”. The parade also provides an opportunity for the ‘outsiders’, Frank and Charlie, to comment on the cultural differences they observe between American and Japanese processions, surprised by the informality of the spectators, who are free to sit on rooftops, and wave to the President, in contrast to what they describe as a more formal and hierarchical process in Japanese Imperatorial processions. In this episode, memories of the parade

Figure 1.3 “A Visit from the President”. The Four Immigrants Manga: A Japanese Experience in San Francisco, 1904–1924 by Henry (Yoshitaka) Kiyama, translated by Frederik L. Schodt, p. 89. © Estate of Yoshitaka Kiyama, Frederik L. Schodt. Used with permission of Stone Bridge Press, Berkeley, California.

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are presented to the reader second-hand through Frank and Charlie’s commentary. After the parade, Charlie states, “Well, I’ve read about democracy in magazines, but this sure was a surprise” and continues, “Japanese are being excluded from America, but if I could become a citizen and run for president someday, I’d put a stop to it!” (89). The levity of his concluding remark, as in other episodes, bears the traces of earlier Japanese visual traditions, such as the Toba-e tradition of cartooning11 (in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries with peak popularity between 1716–36 in Edo) with its focus on puns and comedic scenario. Readers may also draw associations between Kiyama’s style and that of The Japan Punch (1862–1887), a satirical review drawn by the English artist and cartoonist Charles Wirgman (1835–1891) (Clark quoted in japansociety.org.uk).12 One of the most intriguing aspects of Kiyama’s text is the way that it condenses the lived experiences of issei in turn of the century San Francisco into two-page stories that utilise the plasticity of the comics form to convey the fragmented nature of memory. A striking example takes place in Episode 48, “The Turlock Incident”, which offers a remarkable account of an historical event that took place on the night of 19 July 1921. Shortly after midnight, Japanese labourers working in the town of Turlock, in California’s mid-East, were loaded onto trucks by an armed group of 50 to 60 local men, driven out of town, and warned to never return. Several groups of Japanese workers were forcibly moved in this way, and in Kiyama’s rendition, Frank and Charlie travel to harvest pumpkins in Turlock upon hearing that they can earn higher wages there (Figure 1.4). In the third panel, Kiyama depicts an interior setting, where four local men sit at a table, inciting one another through statements such as, “I live in this town 70 years. This is our white town”, while another comments “Lots of Japs came in” (sic), and a third states, “We must kick them out”. Here, Kiyama offers an imaginative documentary framework based on details that he may have gleaned from newspaper accounts of the event and anecdotal evidence. As with McCay’s “The Sinking of the Lusitania”, Kiyama’s imaginative strategy places the reader at the heart of the action. The next panel shows the armed men walking into a Japanese Inn, before they load the migrant workers, including Frank and Charlie, onto a wagon. They are terrified, whispering, “I’m scared! What’ll they do to us?”, and “Hope they don’t plan to kill us…”, while one of the aggressors instructs “SHUT UP” (italics in original 124). Eventually, they are deposited on a “desolate plain”, with a sign in the background pointing towards Turlock. In the same panel, the locals yell “HOORAH” from the back of the wagon as they start back to town. The remainder of the sequence focusses on the men’s outrage and disbelief in situ, such as Charlie’s angry tirade, who suggests that they “sue the government for $1,000,000 each!” after finding the details of the “bastards” who brought them there. As ever, Kiyama is sensitive to the different lived experiences of racism; an unnamed character responds, “Gosh…it was dark… and besides…I kept staring at their guns…” (italics in original, 125) as though to signal his hesitation towards Charlie’s ideas. Within the space of this brief

Figure 1.4 “The Turlock Incident”. The Four Immigrants Manga: A Japanese Experience in San Francisco, 1904–1924 by Henry (Yoshitaka) Kiyama, translated by Frederik L. Schodt, p. 124. © Estate of Yoshitaka Kiyama, Frederik L. Schodt. Used with permission of Stone Bridge Press, Berkeley, California.

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sequence, Kiyama tends to the heterogeneity of responses to the armed deportation, rendering them in a lively and expressive manner through subtle changes in the characters’ expressions. At the conclusion of the episode, Frank and Charlie approach an elderly Japanese man, a tramp perhaps, who seems fast asleep as he snores on the side of the road. In response to their request for help, his expression barely changes as he explains, “No sense raising a ruckus ‘bout this stuff, boys… I try ta grin’n bear it, but when that fails, sometimes snoring does the trick…” (italics in original, 125). In a footnote to the panel, Schodt explains the man’s somewhat incongruous statement by reference to the original Japanese gag where the expression naki neiri (to go to sleep crying) is used to describe “situations when there is no choice but to endure or ‘grin and bear it’” (Kiyama 146). Kiyama blends Japanese and English sayings to create an inventive response to this event. The man’s rustic appearance and unusual speech suggest that he belongs to an older generation of issei, and who may have lived through similar incidents in the past. His depiction also anticipates the tramp culture that would emerge during and after the Great Depression in the USA (1929–1941). The temporal proximity between the Turlock incident (1921) and the introduction of the Immigration Act in 1924 is worth noting, with the attack foregrounding the xenophobic impulses that would congeal into the explicit discrimination enacted under the 1924 Act. For example, two days after the incident, the Sacramento Union published an article that exhorted the avoidance of the mistreatment of Japanese “within our borders” but also referred to the incident as “an illustration of the menace to the peace and well being of [the United States] due to the failure of the government to exclude Orientals from our ports” (23 July 1921, 4). Notably, the Japanese Exclusion League of California issued a statement that it “deeply deprecated” this event “not only as an injustice to the Japanese, but because it is an injury to the cause of exclusion” (22 July 1921, 2) in a perversely un-empathetic affirmation. In reckoning with what would have been a contemporaneous event, Kiyama allows the perspectives of his characters to speak to the terror of the incident. The men’s expressions of shock and disbelief are particularly important because, as Schodt notes, while six individuals were later tried, “it was hard to find Japanese willing to testify” and “[a]n all-white jury acquitted the defendants in ten minutes” (Kiyama 146). The portrayal of this event within Kiyama’s comic thereby provides an alternative source of testimony through an imagined pictorial archive. Kiyama depicts this episode within a mere two pages, and yet takes the reader on a journey with the men through hope, fear, and indignation, before ending on a trademark gag style, offering a veritable tour de force of comics’ ability to illuminate a subject matter through its temporal compression. The strip’s comical aspects allow an alternate account of the traumatic event to emerge from the perspective of the Japanese workers. This is a vital component in generating cultural memories of the event as an intimate experience that is not simply ‘out there’ but brought into a proximal arrangement for the reader’s understanding.

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Throughout The Four Immigrants Manga, Kiyama portrays a variety of hostile acts towards the issei, in episodes such as “Japanese Immigrants Arriving via Hawaii” which was a practical outcome of the ‘Gentlemen’s Agreement’ discussed below, and the “Alien Land Act” of 1913, among others. The work bears witness to the injustices and inequities regarding the treatment of Japanese people in the United States, and Kiyama drew on his understanding and memories of selected socio-political events by animating them in a fictional narrative. The episodic nature of the narrative accesses the discontinuities that characterise later trauma comics, such as In the Shadow of No Towers (2004) by Art Spiegelman, where each two-page spread bears the date range within which they were created in their margins. Spiegelman describes that after the attack on the World Trade Towers in 2001, he was gripped by the fear that he may not survive long enough to create a long-form narrative. Thus, he was able to manage and narrate his traumatised relation to time through the fractured layering of narrative space, held within two page segments. The “Turlock Incident” marked a turning point in the relationship between then Japanese and American administrations, which had begun to fester. Fifteen years earlier, the so-called “Gentlemen’s Agreement” of 1907 was made between President Theodore Roosevelt and the Empire of Japan in response to growing hostility from Anglo American communities in California towards Japanese labourers. Under the Gentlemen’s Agreement, the US Government continued to issue passports to workers who had previously been to the USA, as well as to the relatives and families of Japanese migrants already in the country, with the Japanese Emperor agreeing to deny permission to citizens seeking to enter the USA for the first time. This discriminatory tactic contributed to the growing hostilities faced by Japanese migrants in California, formalised in the establishment of groups such as the Japanese and Korean Exclusion League in 1905, later changing its name to the Asiatic Exclusion League, which advocated for segregated learning in schools, among other measures. The “Gentlemen’s Agreement” also led to the phenomenon of the ‘picture bride’, where women from Japan arrived in the USA in anticipation of marriage following the selection of their picture by an eligible bachelor. As Schodt notes, this process continued the tradition of arranged marriages, and was usually coordinated through the involvement of the bride and groom’s respective families (Kiyama 145). These policy developments eventually led to the complete ban of migration by individuals from ‘Asian’ backgrounds to the USA under the Immigration Act of 1924. The dénouement of The Four Immigrants Manga directly refers to the Immigration Act, and gestures to Kiyama’s return to Japan, in the final episode “Good Bye”. Frank visits Henry at his house and explains, “I was thinking… before they ban all immigration on July 1st, 1924, maybe I oughta go back to the old country, find a wife, then start over again here” (ellipsis and emphasis in original 132). Henry agrees to travel back to Japan with Frank, and so the four friends gather again for a banquet – a bookend to the text’s opening episode – to say farewell. This sequence directly recalls the sequence in Episode One in the composition of the conversation around the table. Henry states,

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Kiyama’s trans-Pacific migrations and inquiry into Western art practices allowed him to document historical events in San Francisco in the early decades of the twentieth century. What makes his story so pertinent to exploring memory is the way that the events and moments described therein are imagined anew through the intimate and subjective perspectives of four Japanese immigrants. Though originally intended for what would have been a small, bilingual Japanese audience, the work stands as a vital document recording the plight and endeavours of the issei. Schodt notes the dearth of English language books on the issei, which he ascribes to language restrictions, but also the “human disaster of World War II and the effects of the incarceration of Japanese Americans in concentration camps”. In the face of these archival losses, “the history of Japanese Americans today cannot be fully understood without understanding the issei and the experiences of people like Henry Kiyama” (Kiyama 18). In turning to explore The Arrival (2006) by Shaun Tan, the discussion moves from the documentary to the surreal – yet the differences between the two styles are not so dissimilar, as Tan also relies heavily on various forms of archival record to portray a story that is at once singular and universal.

The Arrival Shaun Tan’s The Arrival is a complex work of memory. It offers a visual exploration of migration, and the role of memory, through the character of an unnamed migrant, who leaves behind his family to travel to an unknown and distant place. As a mostly wordless work, The Arrival distills themes relating to migration, loss, and regeneration into its main storyline. The design, construction, and aesthetic approach of the text, with its use of melancholic sepia tones and foxing, help stage the ‘history’ of the work alongside the ontological disorientation of migration. Tan has suggested that stories of migration are “a constellation of intimate, human-sized aspirations and dilemmas: how to learn a phrase, where to catch a train, where to buy an item, whom to ask for help and, perhaps more importantly, how to feel about everything” (emphasis in original, Sketches 2010, 10). In its locatedness from another time, The Arrival itself functions as a pseudo-souvenir of migration, a keepsake whose place of origin is impossible to locate. In this way, it seems that the stories within its pages have been recalled from the cusp of forgetting, or being forgotten about. It is perhaps this “longing for its place of origin” (Stewart 1984, xii) that colour the pages of the text as an entity in its own right, as it also describes the journeys of its central characters.

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Works from Tan’s oeuvre, from Tales from Outer Suburbia (2008), The Red Tree (2001), The Lost Thing (2000a), to The Rabbits (2000b) portray themes such as loss, alienation, and encounters with the unknown through mixed visual ecologies. These concerns are also evident in the narrative arc of The Arrival. In the latter, the city in which the migrant arrives offers a blending of the industrial, bureaucratic, and the surreal in ways that are highly conversant with images and atmospheres evoked in the work of Kafka, Orwell, Borges, as well as Surrealists such as Ernst and de Chirico. Although written around 75 years after The Four Immigrants Manga, The Arrival shares similar concerns about the tenuousness of migration and adapting to a new country, borrowing much of its visual vocabulary from migration to the United States and specifically arrivals to Ellis Island. Tan’s statement about growing up in the predominantly Anglo-Australian cultural environment of Perth, Western Australia, demonstrates the ongoing presence of xenophobia, calling to mind the sentiments behind an event like the ‘Turlock Incident’, discernible in an Australia of the 1980s, More problematic was a simmering racism in suburban WA during the 1980s, when it was not uncommon to hear or see spray-painted the slogan ‘Asians Out’. All this meant in practice was that bullies didn’t even have to try to think of a flaw when it came to Asian kids, just being Asian was bad enough. (“Strange Migrations” 2012) Here, the signification of ‘Asianness’ as a visible and cultural attribute provokes a racist response, its directive echoing that of Australia’s ‘White Australia Policy’, which lasted from 1901 to around 1966. In The Arrival, Tan uses a hybrid visual technique to portray the stories of several outsiders by transplanting themes and images from post-World War I European street scenes and narratives of migration to the United States, as well as early imaginative accounts of migration to Australia, and re-historicises these accounts into novel relations with one another. One upshot of intermingling these narratives is that these ‘formal’ histories are defamiliarised and acquire an epistemological uncertainty like the stories of the migrants themselves. Indeed, following his arrival, the main character meets other immigrants, whose stories are woven into the overarching narrative and include accounts of desperate escapes from persecution and child slavery (Figure 1.5). In this sketch, Tan creates an originary scene suggestive of the cramped living conditions and Victorian squalor of “Over London – By Rail” in Gustave Doré’s and Jerrold Blanchard’s London: A Pilgrimage (1970[1872]). Doré was himself influenced by the work of William Hogarth, the English engraver and painter, whose works such as “A Harlot’s Progress”, “A Rake’s Progress”, and “Marriage A-la-Mode”, among others, operated as a form of proto comics journalism in their satirical and impassioned visual commentary on social practices and norms. The political import of such critique is evident

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Figure 1.5 “Escape – Draft Sketch”. Image and permission kindly provided by Shaun Tan.

in Doré’s “Over London – By Rail”, and infuses the scene that Tan presents as the condition of the young woman’s indentured labour. In her retelling of the past, she manages to escape, carrying only a book, which she still possesses in adulthood, a physical memory of the past. Tan thus locates Doré’s drawing in a new narrative setting, affording it a new temporal and cultural afterlife through an imagined past. As a tactile object, The Arrival similarly bears the simulated imprint of the old, the faded, and the forgotten, and this is emphasised by Tan’s use of graphite pencil on cartridge paper for the finished images (Sketches 2010). As a memento from another time, The Arrival approximates what Annette Kuhn distinguishes as the “material existence” that photographs and photographic albums enjoy (2010, 304). The spine of the book is designed as an old leather-bound tome, the edges of the cover swathed with a filigree of printed cracks. The elements within the raised relief of the cover illustration – a man in a three-piece suit, holding a suitcase, looking at a strange creature – hint at a journey towards the unknown and fantastical. The warm sepia of the photo-realistic image suggests that the work is located in the realm of nostalgic memory. Other visual influences include Goya’s proto-Brechtian Los Caprichos print series (1799), whose macabre sepia-hued aquatints lampoon, as Goya himself wrote, the “common prejudices and deceitful practices which custom, ignorance, or self-interest have made usual” (Hughes 2003, 23). The ravaged war-torn streetscapes of Vittorio De Sica’s early Italian neorealist film The Bicycle Thief (1948) also provided a visual influence for the ‘snapshot’ styled street scenes in the work.

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Another notable feature of the text is the absence of pagination; the reader must locate their position in the book through the use of a burnished gold ribbon, a technique reminiscent of photo albums and classically bound books. Together, these effects create an imagined past through the artifice of the text. While Tan’s work directs its readers through a silent ‘cinematic’ narrative, its very silence produces a polyphonic reading of the images. Although the migrant occupies the central narrative arc of the work, his interactions with other characters instantiate a dialogic mode of representation and emphasise the importance of empathetic exchange. By incorporating other stories of arrivals into the migrant’s journey, his experience of migration emerges contrapuntally, much like the operation of memories themselves that are recalled in fragments, and triggered by other stories and other associative networks such as shapes and images. Concerns about how objects or people might be provided a space to call home is evident in The Arrival, a theme shared by other titles in Tan’s oeuvre. For example, The Lost Thing is about a boy who befriends a large, nameless entity who does not seem to belong anywhere, whose appearance seems to derive some visual elements from Max Ernst’s The Elephant Celebes (1921). In an interview with the ABC’s Radio National in 2010, Shaun Tan explained: I find [stories of outsiders] very moving […] there’s something about things being lost or misplaced or a kind of alienation or a misunderstanding that […] relates to feelings that a lot of children have too. (“The Worlds of Shaun Tan” 2010) The Arrival also bears the imprint of more recent literary influences, such as the Australian writer T.A.G. Hungerford’s short story Wong Chu and the Queen’s Letterbox (1977) about a Chinese family living in Perth, Western Australia, and Raymond Briggs’ The Snowman (1978), both of which explore belonging and loss through nostalgic reverie. Indeed, the absence of formal frames and the soft shades of the pencil work in these respective works by Tan and Briggs raises particular associations about the indeterminate nature of memory presented to the reader through the soft ‘fuzziness’ of the visual texture in both texts. I suggest that this ‘fuzziness’ – rather than blurring – is a visual element that holds the reader against the grain of its texture, immersing them in the soft tactility of its representation, a feature also evident in Small Things (2016) by the artist Mel Tregonning, as well as in the work of comics artist and animator Miriam Katin. A sense of nostalgic memory as possessing a faded and soft texture is also evident in Hungerford’s story, where the narrator recalls memories from his childhood in the suburb of South Perth. The enigmatic figure at the centre of the story is Wong Chu, a Chinese immigrant, who presents the narrator with “six magical Chinese kites” (1977, 4), and who disappears at the conclusion of the story. His disappearance coincides with the urbanisation of the narrator’s suburb, and the story incorporates both forms of loss into its melancholic tone, perhaps exemplified by the narrator’s question, “Why, when I look back on my childhood in South Perth is it always summer?” (2). The Arrival portrays the wistful tenor of this story

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visually – the world of the migrant is forever painted in sepia, or at least the sequences available to the reader. The city at which the migrant arrives is built, imaginatively, on an ethos of vulnerability, where each inhabitant is marked by “some degree of injury” whether physical or emotional (Tan 2010, “Migration and Multiculturalism”). Here, vulnerability and difference present challenges but do not, in themselves, denigrate the social status of the new arrivals. The people in this city are noticeably diverse in appearance so that no particular group can be visually designated as a dominant class. The diversity of the populace reflects the ideologies of “pluralism and multiculturalism” (“Migration and Multiculturalism”) that structure the city. Significantly, this means that the differences that mark its inhabitants are retained so that there is a space for communication of injury and vulnerability. Taken together, these aspects of the text offer an opportunity for readers to reflect on how communities can be constituted through a discourse of vulnerability, and one where memory plays an important role for opening pathways of social connectivity as the characters’ past experience resonate and differ from one another’s. Ann Anlin Cheng observes that ethnic and immigrant narratives frequently overidealise multiculturalism and privilege “euphoria in place of injury” (1997, 52). The Arrival speaks back to this utopian misdiagnosis in that while it offers moments of hope, it retains the thorny edges of migration through its melancholic intimacy with its characters and their pasts. The barriers of migration are represented metonymically through the defamiliarised representation of a text that readers recognise as containing signification but are unable to read or locate in the hinterland of other languages they may know. Like the migrant who is unable to read a new language, the reader struggles to comprehend the written signs of the new place. In this way, readers must creatively engage with all manner of visual cues to navigate their understanding of the text and the migrant’s journey (“Comments on The Arrival”). Tan used Roman letters and rendered them incomprehensible through a cut-up technique, in which he inverted and combined them to create a new alphabet that was partly Roman in appearance and partly pictographic. Their strangeness supports the unusual world of the text, which combines photo-realistic and surrealistic elements to mimic the disorientation of migration. Tan borrows from the aesthetic registers of cinema and photographic albums to inform and regulate the affective intensity of the story, creating cardboard ‘sets’ to simultaneously imagine and crystalise the visual construction of the text (Sketches). The use of drawings as a replacement for verbal communication is evident in the narrative itself, such as when the migrant searches for an apartment and must communicate that message ichnographically, with paper and pen, after his attempts at speaking fail. This storytelling device bears a metatextual relationship with the construction of the text, and Tan has commented on the role of an illustrator as storyteller, where “some ideas can only be expressed through a silent language of images” (Sketches 31). Tan also emphasises the way the reader is “hit by [the] image” upon turning the pages in The Arrival (“Lost and Found”), so that the affective impact of the narrative is thus intimately connected to embodied practices of reading.

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Photographs and memory The photographic album can be understood as a collection that brings together multiple stories to produce a record that Martha Langford describes as having both epic and anecdotal dimensions (2001, 175). Both aspects are evident within The Arrival as the sequences are a testament to the passage of time on an epic scale, but which is also focalised through fragments of the quotidian. The intermingling of other stories with the migrant’s own interrupt the linear progression of his narrative and generate multidirectional memories as they collide and produce new meanings through their interaction. The migrant’s story is about one family, but also stands as an extended deliberation on migration as an epistemological and ontological crisis. In the endpapers of the text, the reader encounters 60 photo-realistic faces that gaze outwards. The dimensions of these drawings resemble passport photos, and are based on photographs of migrants on arrival at Ellis Island (Sketches 2010, 12), with one of them based on a childhood photograph of Tan’s father (“Lost and Found”). The anonymity of this endpaper populace in their paratextual setting mimics the process of displacement and bureaucratic encounter that characterises migration, which is then refracted through the singularity of the migrant’s story. Here, the interplay between these different forms of address (the photographic and the fantastic) may remind the reader of the unsettling yet productive modulation between contact sheets and drawn strips used by Emmanuel Guibert in The Photographer (2006), which forms the subject of Chapter 5, as well as different uses of the photographic archive in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006) and Maus (2003) by Art Spiegelman. The mechanical technologies depicted in the narrative such as steam and propeller power, are emblems of European and American modernisms, and the work is partly bound to these pasts through this set of visual cues. By utilising these overdetermined signifiers from a modern but past industrial age, Tan’s work partially encrypts the text within this era. In another gesture towards technologies of the past, The Arrival borrows from the language of photographic albums in that the images are arranged as they might appear in a print photo album, united as they are by the sepia hues of the various photographs. Within its pages, the reader does not discover the identity of the migrant, nor of the other characters that populate the album. This silence also speaks of the Kristavan lacunae (or excess) encountered by the migrant who is between languages (15). The rhizomatic structure of the text broadens its thematic horizons as the reader peruses this album from a location and time that are only partially recognisable. This reading is supported by Susan Sontag’s argument that, “a photograph is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence […] photographs – especially those of people, of distant landscapes and faraway cities, of the vanished past – are incitements to reverie” (1992, 285). Here, the incitement to reverie raises questions about how this text represents memory, the instantiation of cultural citizenship and the

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organisation of difference. It is within this liminal space that the text’s nostalgic mode operates to signify its complicated temporality. This is unsurprising in a migratory context when so much is lost in the upheaval of transition, and yet which generates new opportunities. In the face of these changes, the photo album provides a compact repository of memories through the operation of visual nostalgia. The melancholy of the narrative is underscored by the unknowability of the album’s origins. The title page bears a stamp alongside an image of an inspection card dated 23 March 1912, which marks the book’s journey as a travelling object, one that bears its own traces of impossible time. As a ‘souvenir’ of a time past, the book appears to have withstood the ravages of time, simulated through defects such as foxing, stains, rips, creases, and partial erasures, and in some place, images have crumbled away entirely. The text’s nostalgic remembrance of a future-past carves out a space between realism and the surreal as it is haunted by an impossible desire for return – perhaps like the migrant’s own. The combination of these visual styles in the new land means that it occupies a space between the familiar and the unusual – perhaps best exemplified in the sequence where the migrant attempts to use kitchen utensils for the first time. This form of unsettlement means that the past cannot be simply taken as a recognisable, fully coded past, but rather invokes a temporal realm that is never over or closed off. The absence of closure generates a double movement wherein the investigation of a seemingly past world invites the exploration of a future hitherto unimagined. In the words of Svetlana Boym, this “futurepast” form of nostalgia offers a version of the past that is not only a repository for “fallen empires” but also houses the “unrealized dreams of the past and visions of the future” that may be obsolete or elude achievement (2001, xvi). The narrative strategy that the text offers in this respect, through the book’s unknown origin, galvanises the reader’s participation in the text’s multiple layers of signification – as an object as well as through the stories it furnishes. Memory objects: origami and the fold In “The Third Meaning”, Roland Barthes wrote that the “obtuse” meaning takes the form of “an emergence, of a fold [a crease even] marking the heavy layer of informations and significations” (brackets in original, 1977, 62). Mario Carpo has similarly emphasised the fold as a “generative” process, where the fold highlights the idea that forms “can change, morph and move: a new category of objects defined not by what they are, but by the way they change and by the laws that describe their continuous variations” (2004, 14–15). As a metaphor for the productivities of migration, the ‘fold’ offers useful mode for thinking about how Tan chooses to reveal the migrant’s social-psychic adaptation following his migration through the change in his hand-made origami animals. In this case, the “laws” that describe their variations, to use

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Carpo’s phrase, govern the shifts in understanding, perception, and knowledge that migrants use to negotiate their new surrounds. Here, folding functions as an explicit visual technique through the representation of origami. The art of origami consists in the ability to fold a two-dimensional object – a piece of paper – into a three-dimensional one using only the attributes of the paper. The construction of the object is variable, impermanent, and can therefore be adapted into different forms, so that it is defined by its mutability rather than its shape. The generative capabilities of the fold constitute an essential characteristic of origami, and this is evident in the way that the origami animals change over time in The Arrival. Tan has explained that, My dad taught me most of the origami I know, so I associate it with a craft that comes from ‘elsewhere’ and travels like a meme, and relates to my ancestry. It’s also a very universal craft, and is to do with reductive forms that can be replicated through a near-mathematical universal language. (email to author) The origami bird in the first frame of the diegesis foregrounds the journey to come in the way that the reader can imagine its step-by-step creation, and in the way that the shape of the bird is only arrived at after a process, rather than pre-fabricated (Figure 1.6). Soon, we see that the letters the migrant sends to his family, and those he receives from them, are always folded into the same kind of origami bird, which immediately creates an association between him and his home, and the bird as a symbol of migration. Over the duration of the narrative, the form of the bird shifts to a foxlike animal, and eventually to the figure of the creature in the new land that becomes the migrant’s pet. In this context, the technique of folding and unfolding relate intimately to the unravelling and changes in the structures of thinking that shape the process of migration. That paper is the material universal to the origami animals, works diachronically and synchronically within the text, as it links the narrative with the physical process of reading the text. Moreover, certain images such as the origami bird attain an iconic value through their repeated use throughout the text. For example, the first frame contains a drawing of an origami bird that provides the first clue of the story and emphasises the partial connection between object and representation. The origami bird is an approximation of ‘birdness’, and Tan’s drawing of the origami bird is a representation of its form. Perched upright, the bird adds a tactile emphasis to the frames that follow on this page, grouped as it is with a child’s drawing of a family, a chipped, steaming teapot, travel tickets, and assorted papers. The clock in the second frame encourages the reader to imagine its ticking and this sound of the interior quietly infuses the remainder of the panels with a resonant and steady rhythm, working in harmony with their uniform dimensions to afford an equal contemplative weight.

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Figure 1.6 “Originary Montage”. The Arrival by Shaun Tan. © Shaun Tan. Used with permission of Lothian Children’s Book, an imprint of Hachette Australia, 2006.

Each frame in this sequence presents a partial mystery; for example, the lid of the dish in the fourth frame is propped open, and the spout of the teapot ‘steams’ in the sixth frame. These indicia of use invest the opening sequence with energy and anticipation. Read together, the seventh and eighth frames start to focus the reader’s attention as the tickets and bank notes suggest an action that has not yet unfolded. The final panel in this sequence depicts a photograph of what the reader will come to understand as the migrant’s family, consisting of the man, his partner, and their daughter. The first page only contains a narrative flow in retrospect. Initially, the establishing shots of each object only confirm relatively minimal information about a domestic setting. In retrospect, however, their familiarity is emphasised as we meet their almost-equivalents in a post-migration setting. Overleaf, Tan maintains

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narrative tension through successive zooms as the migrant packs his suitcase with the family photograph carefully wrapped, before his partner and daughter’s hands hold his own over the closed bag. A few pages later, across the first double-page spread of the work, Tan depicts the fear and uncertainty of an ominous yet ambiguous threat, depicted in the massive tails that have overrun the city. The beginning of the tail-like form remains unseen, and instead Tan locates the apprehension of this eerie presence in the little girl’s face over three frames. The following frame pans out into an outdoor train station, darkened with fog and peopled only by silhouettes. In the last panel of this page, the reader is again privy to the family’s parting exchanges, as the man places a hand on his daughter’s shoulder, and then presents her with an origami bird, playfully kept under his hat. The couple then embrace and hold each other before bidding a tearful farewell and he boards the train (Figure 1.7). Here, Tan repeats the sequence of their hands holding on to each other and then letting go, to convey the image’s stark immediacy, the absolute absence that every parting references. The gestures embodied in this transition are simultaneously performative and iterative; their movements speak for the departure that is about to take place, as well as presenting a set of affective associations contained in the intimacy of touch and communication. In graphic form, these signs offer an alternative to Anthony Paraskeva’s argument, in relation to written narratives, that “to document a gesture is also to register the failure of language to document gesture […] a gesture cannot be written, without distorting its signifying force” (2013, 7). In comics, the gesture is already present – always already performed so that its signification unfolds through the viewing of the panel, whether in the presence of written text or without. This mimics the recollection of actions and gestures that have already taken place, the variable contours of which depend on the affective dimension of the memory, so that, for example, the close-up on the hands depicts the emotional intensity attached to the moment of departure. As the train leaves, the reader’s perspective is aligned with that of his family, as we watch the train pass diagonally into the distant horizon. The shift from the square orientation of the geographic plane of late Renaissance painting to the oblique composition of the Baroque resulted in an “increase [in the] psychological drama of the design” (Monaco 2009, 212).13 The train’s passage into the depth of field utilises this oblique angle to convey the drama and tension of this scene, amplifying the affective scope of the migrant’s departure, that is to say, making it deep. Throughout The Arrival, hands perform as metonyms for communication, creativity, and connection as they touch, create, point, and gesture. When the migrant arrives at the new city (with a skyline reminiscent of New York City), the large statues in the background shake hands in a permanent act of welcome – prefiguring the importance of community, rather than individuality, in this place. These examples of gestural signification rely on the reader’s world knowledge to interpret their meanings, often the sole mode of communication

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Figure 1.7 “Departure”. The Arrival by Shaun Tan. © Shaun Tan. Used with permission of Lothian Children’s Book, an imprint of Hachette Australia, 2006.

available in an unfamiliar place. The use of gesture thus depicts the process of loss metaphorically through the movements of connection and disconnection (Fort/da) of and between hands. For example, in the opening sequences of the primary narrative, the reader witnesses a domestic scene as the migrant

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prepares to leave his country. Around a table, which occupies the central space of the frame, three chairs in the foreground confirm that the reader is observing a pivotal moment for the migrant and his family. The couple’s facial and body gestures suggest tension and contained sadness; in particular, the migrant’s posture, like the origami bird in the opening frame, in a manner that anticipates departure. In the next sequence, the reader accompanies the family at close range as they prepare for the migrant’s journey, with grey-based sepia hue underscoring the tension in their home. The unnamed threat is represented by the shadow of a spikey tail on the facing page, a threat that encounters in the new city will trigger by their visual association; for example, the similarlooking tail of a pet causes the migrant to recoil, before he distinguishes between the two. The replication of this simple shape conveys how traumatic memories are stored within the mind and triggered by seemingly unrelated events or details.14 The tail is the reader’s first intra-textual encounter with the fantastic, and an image that reappears in various forms throughout the story. The expanse of the plain wall threatens to overwhelm the family as they walk, huddled through the darkened street, their features barely distinguishable. One sequence in the new place commences by depicting the migrant’s creature and an owl-like creature contemplating each other. Here, both creatures stand in for their owners, and this is represented in the next panel as its contents depict the migrant turning towards a woman who is reading a book. Soon, the woman shows the migrant how to obtain a ticket using an apparatus to board a flying ship. On their journey, they show each other their identity papers, and their movements mirror each other as they share this information. Their gestural mirroring represents an empathic understanding between them, despite their different stories of migration. As they converse, the successive frames zoom onto the woman’s identification photograph, and this is a reversal of an earlier mise-en-abyme sequence, where an image of the migrant’s photograph is folded up as part of an identity paper, upon which the reader encounters another representation of the migrant within yet another frame. This spatial movement embeds her story into the primary narrative and also shifts the temporal setting of the narrative as the photo depicts the woman as a young girl. The identification paper thus acts as a connecting device to her memorystory, which is depicted in a series of distinct meta-panels. The page framing the story is coloured with a bluish-grey hue, and the story-panels are further distinguished through their thin white borders, a technique that is also reminiscent of early twentieth-century photographic prints. The next three pages directly relay the woman’s escape from childhood slavery, plunging the reader into her past. Her loss and subsequent recovery of a cherished book mark her entry into and escape from slavery. As she flees, the final panel in her story depicts a train moving diagonally upwards and towards the edge of the frame, leaving behind an industrial landscape. The steam of the train provides a link with the floating ship in the next panel, and they both travel towards the lower right corner, and ‘towards’ the reader, providing continuity between the

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woman’s past and her present. After the migrant disembarks from the ship, the reader is aligned with his point of view as he contemplates entering ‘The Market’ with the creature. In the seventh frame of the next page, the reader gazes down onto the migrant’s book, which contains a combination of icons of fruit, cheese, bread, and fish, with their corresponding names in the new language. Here, the migrant meets a father and son who assist him in identifying unfamiliar foods, and invite him home to dinner in ‘The Place of Nests’ (“Comments on The Arrival”). Soon, the migrant begins looking for employment, and he faces a number of challenges with each role he tries, because of his unfamiliarity with the linguistic conventions that characterise each position. This is conveyed most clearly on his first day pasting posters around the city. When his supervisor returns, the migrant realises that he has been pasting the posters upside-down, and he is fired from his job. This simple misunderstanding is similar to those in The Four Immigrants Manga, and its visual misinterpretation not unlike Koyanagi’s misreading of the image in “Hell”. The migrant eventually commences work in an enormous factory line, inspecting small containers for defects. This position is introduced through a 12-frame sequence; the successive segments of the conveyor belt that propel the containers stand in a metaphoric relation to the sequential and selective construction of comic frames. While on break, the migrant stands opposite an older man, with whom he converses, and he asks the man how he came to live in this place. In a sequence that borrows its visual grammar from a cinematic dissolve, the man looks at a defective assembly-line object he picks up. The next frame depicts the man adopting the same pose as a youth, this time holding a flower, and the transition into the past maintains the narrative connection through the repetition of the man’s posture and gaze (Figures 1.8 and 1.9). The modulation from the present to the past marks the commencement of his story, and the narrative thread is maintained by the repetition of the man’s posture and gaze as he holds a small object. The dissolve into the past commences the man’s story as a soldier, and the next sequence depicts him bidding farewell to a loved one as he sets off for war. His journey is depicted metonymically through the representation of legs as the soldiers traverse increasingly hazardous terrain. Accordingly, the hue of each frame becomes progressively darker; the men walk past corpses, before breaking into a run against a ravaged background. By being exposed to only legs, the reader must supplement the narrative by extrapolating the conditions of the man’s story. The horror is amplified over the next two pages as the reader is faced with the bones of the dead in a cold, blue-grey frame. The story ends with the solitary soldier’s agonising shuffle as an amputee through a post-war landscape, which takes place over twelve frames. The scene then pans out over the next page onto a desolate landscape with the back of the man in the foreground, before returning to the factory scene through a dissolve onto a view of the older man’s back. Thus the reader sees the back of his head in two successive frames, once at the end of the war, and then again at the factory. Tan depicts the transposition of the present onto the past through the cinematic language of the dissolve wherein images are conjoined and distinguished. The double function

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Figure 1.8 “Dissolve – part 1”. The Arrival by Shaun Tan. © Shaun Tan. Used with permission of Lothian Children’s Book, an imprint of Hachette Australia, 2006.

of the dissolve literalises the function of memory as a phenomenon that conjoins the present with the past. Jennifer Proctor suggests that the “dissolve produces mourning” as something that “simultaneously celebrates that which is lost, that is, affirms that which is absent” (“Différance”, n.d.). In The Arrival, the visual

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Figure 1.9 “Dissolve – part 2”. The Arrival by Shaun Tan. © Shaun Tan. Used with permission of Lothian Children’s Book, an imprint of Hachette Australia, 2006.

presence of the past such as the man’s account of his youth in wartime, means that there is also a melancholic engagement with the past, a personal history that can indeed be affirmed, precisely because it is not lost but rather present within the pages of the narrative’s present. The reader supplies their own understanding of the transition between the two frames and completes the circuitry between past and present.

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The final story opens with a repetition of the opening arrangement, with the objects in each panel acting as a counterpart to the originals in the migrant’s homeland. Significantly, the origami form of the migrant’s creature replaces the origami bird in the first sequence. The reader must interpret how repetition and difference fit into the narrative flow; frames one to seven are directly comparable with their old-world counterparts, while the family photograph now occupies the space of the suitcase in the eighth frame. The composition of the next full-page frame reflects the second page by locating each object in the family’s new domestic setting. As the daughter runs out with the creature among the streets to buy three ‘star-fruit’, her confident navigation demonstrates her familiarity with the city. Upon buying the star fruit, the girl sees a woman – a new arrival – holding a map, and offers her assistance. Thus The Arrival ends with the girl pointing to a location outside the frame, and her position as an inhabitant of the place, directing the new arrival, gestures towards the cyclicity of belonging and inclusion. Who are the indigenous inhabitants of the land, if any, and who are the arrivals? Tan does not make these distinctions clear, thereby calling into question ideas about belonging, inclusion and narratives of cultural cohesion and representations of difference. In The Arrival, infused as it is in a future-past nostalgia for an imaginary world, the repetition of visual oscillations, such as zooms in and out, and the use of mise-en-abyme, approximate the physical play of Fort/ da, as it stages a scopic drive towards the origin, along with the subject’s expulsion from that impossible place.

Conclusion Comics such as The Arrival and The Four Immigrants Manga complicate representations of the subjects who would occupy the status of ‘outsider’ by revealing the differences and similarities that always, and already, constitute local populations. The respective texts immerse readers into their story-worlds by depicting places and spaces that allow a multiplicity of perspectives to emerge – both in relation to their formal contents, as well as depicting stories of migration as a non-singular journey. By emphasising the diversity of experiences of migration, the texts encourage their readers to contemplate the multiple facets that make up this process in immersive and new ways. The next chapter continues this theme by examining cultural memory on difference and its afterlives in American Born Chinese (2006) and Blue (2012) by Pat Grant.

Notes 1 Frederik L. Schodt’s scholarship on manga has been pivotal in bringing this art form to audiences in the West. 2 This scene takes places about 00:27:30 into the film. 3 Frederik L. Schodt, email communication to the author, 29 March 2018.

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4 The term ‘bad eye’ also brings to mind potentially racist connotations. 5 Frederik L. Schodt, email communication to the author, 29 March 2018. 6 For detailed information on the poetry of Angel Island and its significance, see Him Mark Lai, Genny Lim, and Judy Yung. Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910–1940. Seattle,WA and London: University of Washington Press, 1999. Print. For example, one poem states, “Prisoners in this wooden building constantly suffer sadness and boredom/ I remember the hardships I had to endure when I was coming here/ I cannot prophesy which day I will cross the barrier/ The years and months are easily spent in vain” (172). 7 As Frederik L. Schodt explains, a significant proportion of young men entered San Francisco to study, and learn from “Western ways” (Kiyama 1999, 9). 8 The term “schoolboys” refers to “student-laborers” who would perform domestic service for a nominal wage while boarding with an American family, and attend daytime classes (Ichioka, The Issei 1998, 24). 9 Ichioka quotes from Noguchi Yone (Japanese writer of fiction, poetry, essays and literary criticism, and the first Japanese-born author to publish poetry in English), whose description of schoolboys’ mishaps will be familiar to readers of The Four Immigrants Manga: “What a farce we enacted in our first encounter with an American family! Even a stove was a mystery to us. One of my friends endeavoured to make a fire by burning the kindling in the oven […] One fellow terrified the lady when he began to take off his shoes, and even his trousers, before scrubbing the floor [because] he regarded his American clothes as a huge luxury” (25). 10 Similar class issues were common in US and British newspaper strips, such as Richard F. Outcault’s the ‘Yellow Kid’ aka Mickey Dugan, who lived in amongst New York ghettos, who appeared in Hogan’s Alley between 1895 and 1898. 11 Indeed, the well-known artist Katsushika Hokusai drew in the style of Toba-e, and is considered the first proponent of ‘manga’, epitomised by the collection of wood block prints known as the Hokusai Manga (1814–1878). 12 Wirgman also drew “A Sketch Book of Japan” (1884), which contained 39 sketches of Japanese customs with commentary by the artist. 13 The shift in perspective is evident in the opening frames of “At Work Insider our Detention Centres: A Guard’s Story” (2014), as discussed in Chapter 6. 14 Chapter 4 in particular explores this theme further. For additional further reading on this form of recall, see Babette Rothschild, The Body Remembers: The Psychophysiology of Trauma and Trauma Treatment, Chapter 3: The Body Remembers: Understanding Somatic Memory.

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Further reading Chapman, Roger. “A Comic Book Account of Japanese Immigrants in America.” [Book Review] Kiyama, Henry Yoshitaka, The Four Immigrants Manga: A Japanese Experience in San Francisco, 1904–1924. H-US-Japan, H-Net Reviews (1999). Accessed 31 July 2017. Web. Curthoys, Ann and Marilyn Lake. Connected Worlds: History in Transnational Perspective. Canberra: ANU E-Press, 2005. Print. Hayashi, Brian M. “Not So Funny Papers”. Pacific Historical Review 69. 2(2000): 271–278. Print. Gardner, Jared. “Autobiography’s Biography, 1972–2007”. Biography 31. 1(2008): 1–26. Print. Humphrey, Robert L. [Book Review]. “Book Notes”. American Studies International 37. 2(1999): 107–108. Print. Kite, Lorien. “How Shaun Tan Transformed Children’s Literature”. FT Magazine (26 August 2016). https://www.ft.com/content/b60e8c32-64cb-11e6-a08a-c7ac04ef00aa. Accessed 4 March 2017. Web. Kristeva, Julia. Strangers to Ourselves. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. Print. Mukai, Gary. “Teacher’s Guide: Four Immigrants Manga”. Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge Press, n.d. Print. Pepo. Condorito! The Adventure Begins. New York: Harper Publications, 2005. Print. Sacramento Union. “Deportations Are Harmful to Cause of Exclusionists”. 22 July 1921: 2. California Digital Newspaper Collection. https://cdnc.ucr.edu/cgi-bin/cdnc. Accessed 5 November 2017. Web. Sand, Jordan. “Gentlemen’s Agreement, 1908: Fragments for a Pacific History”. Representations 107(2009): 91–127. Print. Schodt, Frederick L. “Reading the Comics”. The Wilson Quarterly 9. 3(1985): 57–66. Print. Shirow, Masamune. Appleseed, Book One: The Promethean Challenge. Trans. Dana Lewis and Toren Smith. Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Comics, 2007. Print. Sontag, Susan. “Strangers in Strange Lands”. Viewpoint: On Books for Young Adults 14. 4 (2006b): 118–125. Print. The Pin. “Meet Shaun Tan; Straight Talking Dreamer”. thepin.org. Accessed 5 November 2017. Web. Wallman, Sam, Nick Olle, Pat Grant and Pat Armstrong. “At Work Inside Our Detention Centres: A Guard’s Story”. The Global Mail. February 2014. serco-story. theglobalmail.org. Accessed 31 March 2014. Web.

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Racism and cultural afterlives: American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang and Pat Grant’s Blue

Introduction This chapter examines productive disruptions of identity politics, xenophobia, and cultural exclusion in American Born Chinese (2006) by Gene Luen Yang and Blue (2012) by Pat Grant. Cultural minorities such as migrant communities are frequently expelled from popular narratives about belonging and nationhood. This is evident in their marginalised or stereotyped representation such as ‘Long Duk Dong’ in Sixteen Candles (1984), where the character’s presence on screen, announced by the sound of a gong, already confirms his otherness even before he poses his catchphase, “What’s happening hot stuff?” to Molly Ringwald’s Samantha.1 Cultural differences may alternately be rendered invisible altogether – such as the 2017 production of Ghost in the Shell which attracted criticism for replacing a central (Japanese) protagonist in the original manga series by Masamune Shirow with a non-Japanese actor, Scarlett Johansson. Stereotypes offer an array of fixed signs about the bodies and their “hieroglyphs” of people and communities who are assigned the position of an excluded other (Ty 2004, 4). As Eleanor Ty argues after Foucault, “what is visible is already a representation” (6), as the framework that configures subjects overdetermines their respective political and cultural identities. Comics are ideally placed to complicate historical archives of exclusion through explicitly political strategies that seek to unsettle the cultural frameworks that would reify those who are deemed ‘other’.2 Disrupting conventional representations of otherness – as both Yang and Grant do – means that readers can engage with difference through defamiliarised frameworks of signification. This recapitulation responds, at least in part, to Judith Butler’s work on grievability, and particularly her attention to the way that ontological frameworks find themselves expressed through physical acts of framing across media (Frames of War 2009, 1). Under these circumstances, disrupting familiar epistemological frames can enliven the reception of difference and generate recognition for subjectivities who may be ignored, mistreated, or otherwise rendered invisible in historical, legal, and cultural archives.

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Indeed, Jared Gardner argues that sequential comics – in contrast to single-panel cartoons – are the “most powerful (in part because least susceptible to authorial discipline) medium for embracing the radical consequences of an alterity that disables stereotype and the easy readings of the hegemonic gaze” (2010, 147). The respective creators of American Born Chinese and Blue dismantle cultural stereotypes by utilising the gaps in the narrative – both between word and image, but also in the space of the gutters. The impact of these lacunae is that they retain rather than dispel narrative tension, particularly useful for the kinds of critique that they perform. What we see in both texts is the way that each artist explores the animating power of racist stereotypes by drawing attention to their afterlives as a form of cultural memory, utilising their multiple representations across, film, television, newsmedia, and photography. As Jan Assman and John Czaplicka suggest, one of the defining features of cultural memory is its self-reflexivity as it “draws on itself to explain, distinguish, reinterpret, criticize, control, surpass” (1995, 132). By placing inherited and frequently problematic signifiers in new and defamiliarised contexts, comics can support the demythologisation of well-worn narratives about difference as they generate innovative approaches to identity politics through multilayered forms of signification.

American Born Chinese As Min Song suggests, modern Western stereotypes associated with China and the Chinese, specifically in the United States, were “first cast in the nineteenth century as Western imperial countries chipped away at China’s sovereignty and Chinese workers began to populate California and the rest of the American West in visibly large numbers” (2010, 78–80). This form of xenophobia was crystallised in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 (the Act), initiated under the Arthur administration, which prohibited Chinese participation in civic life through a suite of provisions such as exclusion from citizenship and travel restrictions. The Act also legislated that Chinese individuals could never become naturalised in the USA because they were considered ‘incapable’ of having the attributes necessary for citizenship. It was only in 2011 that the US Senate passed Resolution 201 under the Obama administration, expressing regret for the passing of discriminatory laws against the Chinese in America, including the Chinese Exclusion Act. Resolution 201 specifically acknowledges the “1887 Snake River Massacre in Oregon, at which 31 Chinese miners were killed”, and “numerous other incidents, including attacks on Chinese immigrants in Rock Springs, San Francisco, Tacoma, and Los Angeles” (S. Res. 201 2), as well as “6 decades of legislation directly targeting the Chinese people for physical and political exclusion” (10). This legacy of discrimination would influence the ways that later generations of writers came to terms with their own cultural history and its varied representations.

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Yang’s American Born Chinese grapples with these exclusionary tactics in each of the three storylines that make up its narrative by bringing together a range of cultural memories and exploring their afterlives. As Lan Dong observes, “[i]t is worth noting that by choosing the term ‘American Born Chinese’ instead of the more inclusive and commonly used ‘Chinese American,’ Yang deliberately draws a distinction between the American-born generation and their immigrant parents” (2011, 232). Moreover, as a work written primarily for young adults, American Born Chinese encourages “cross-writing”, a term that Charles Hatfield – with reference to Mitzi Meyers and U.C. Knoepflmacher’s definition of the term – describes as denoting an “‘interplay’ between adult and child perspectives, one that implies a mixed readership and an author who respects adult and child readers equally” (“Redrawing” 2011, 169), through its multiplicity of cultural reference points. American Born Chinese started off as a “mini comic series” that Yang selfproduced and sold at local comic stores in California and at UCLA Berkeley before it was eventually published in its entirety with First Second Books, becoming a finalist in the category of ‘Young People’s Literature’ at the 2006 National Book Awards. Yang notes that in American Born Chinese he really wanted to connect “historical images of Chinese-Americans, Asians, and Asian-Americans with [their representation] in pop culture” (Barajas 2016). In 2016, Yang was awarded a ‘Genius Grant’ in the MacArthur Fellows Program, with the MacArthur Foundation stating that his work “demonstrates the potential of comics to broaden our understanding of diverse cultures and people” (macfound.org). This intent is apparent in the text, where each of the storylines incorporates myriad cultural and historical references. Yang adapts historical depictions of Chinese stereotypes, perhaps most strikingly in the character of Cousin Chin-Kee. The significance of Chin-Kee as a grotesque composite of historical and cultural memories can be appreciated through reference to historical caricatures and stereotypes associated with Chinese immigrants, specifically derived from the “racist imagery prevalent in the late 1800s and early 1900s” (Yang, “Printz” 2007, 12). One of the most popular iterations of this imagery was the character of Dr Fu Manchu, infamously introduced by Sax Rohmer – pen name of novelist Arthur Henry Ward – in his 1913 novel, The Insidious Dr Fu Manchu, Imagine a person, tall, lean and feline, high-shouldered, with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan, a close-shaven skull, and long, magnetic eyes of the true cat-green. Invest him with all the cruel cunning of an entire Eastern race, accumulated in one giant intellect, with all the resources of science past and present, with all the resources, if you will, of a wealthy government – which, however, already has denied all knowledge of his existence. Imagine that awful being, and you have a mental picture of Dr. Fu-Manchu, the yellow peril incarnate in one man. (1913, 10)

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Each of these aspects is evident within Chin-Kee’s characterisation; he is at once a lecherous threat, a “model minority”, a naïve performer, and perhaps most significantly, unremarkable to most of his classmates. Some of his features are evident in the historical cartoons of illustrator Thomas Nast (1840– 1902). Nast drew depictions of Santa Claus and Uncle Sam, among others, and he was popularly described as the ‘Father of the American Cartoon’. Less popular were his cartoons of ‘Chinamen’ (and the ‘Yellow Peril’ more generally), marked by their insidious, threatening demeanours – and most of who sport a queue (where hair on the upper half of the head is grown and braided while the bottom half is shaved, or a variation of this arrangement), in the same fashion as Chin-Kee. As Michele Walfred (2014) notes, “Nast used queues in a number of ways: as a weapon for the Chinese, a weapon against the Chinese, as a tool, as a barometer of emotion, as a lifeline, as a hangman’s noose, as a tail, and on Americans as a symbol of irony”. The queue was a dominant feature in stereotyped representations of ‘Chinamen’ in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries across films, newspaper cartoons, and comics, and mostly in problematic ways, such as the Fu Manchu film series.3 Yang also delved into comics history as part of Chin-Kee’s characterisation, borrowing the latter’s “leering eyes and menacing slouch” from Ching Lung, created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster of Superman fame, for the first issue of Detective Comics published in March 1937 (Yang “Printz” 2007, 13). In 2016, Yang reprised the character of Ching Lung in the Rebirth series of New Superman for which he wrote a battle between Lung and Superman Kong Kenan, as well as the Chinese Justice League. Yang overcame his initial hesitation for the project, stating, “[i]f we really want to embrace who we are as Americans, we have to look at both the good and the bad and the pretty and the ugly of our history. If rebirth is about reclaiming a lot of DC’s past, we also have to examine some of the ugly stuff too” (Jaybee 2017). Thus, the figure of Chin-Kee incorporates some of the problematic and racist attitudes towards Chinese immigrants in the West through the character’s particular aesthetic and affective attributes. By reflecting these references in a new storyworld, Yang offers a critique of their legitimacy and invites the reader to form their own impressions of the contexts from which he draws. American Born Chinese is arranged via three alternating narratives that each feature a principal protagonist, namely, the Monkey King, Jin Wang, and Danny and Cousin Chin-Kee. The book opens with a depiction of the Monkey King, a character introduced in the sixteenth-century Ming epic, Journey to the West, and concludes with an interrupted broadcast of the sitcom, “Everyone Ruvs Chin-Kee”. As Rocío G. Davis notes, the central characters in the story must “deal with particular forms of visibility” (2013, 9), focussing on the ways that they do not fit with each of their cultural surroundings, mostly because of visible signifiers of difference. Through these narratives, Yang explores cultural memories through his reimagining of historical stereotypes and their interpolation into the present of the text on multiple levels. The book itself is rendered in what can be characterised as

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pop meets clair ligne, reminiscent of cartoons such as Transformers (1984– 1987), as well as Daria (1997–2001), in the book’s stylised fight scenes, use of sound effects, and emanata.4 Across each of the stories, the visual depth of field is frequently flattened, which encourages an intimacy between reader and text as physical actions – including gestures and subtle shifts in facial expression – are readily apparent. The storylines are afforded some degree of unity through their aesthetic constraints, where the panels are rendered in clean lines and a muted yet dynamic colouring scheme. The aesthetic mode is inviting to read, readily legible for a young adult audience, yet belies the sophistication of the narrative via the formal fragmentation of the text. These narratives are almost entirely dissociated from one another, until the book’s final pages, which encourages the reader to re-evaluate the connections that have lain dormant in the gaps between the storylines. Moreover, the repeated rotation between the stories establishes a formal connection between a mythic past, a ‘realistic’ present, and a television sitcom – and by the end of the book, the reader can see how these are in fact deeply connected. The narrative structure embodies and mimics the central concerns of the text about the disavowal, or splintering off of identity, and the return of the repressed, as aggression and pain finally collide, literally, in the book’s closing chapter. The book’s structure thus mimics the compartmentalisation that can take place with regards to difficult memories; for example, Danny’s textual ‘amnesia’ means that he is unaware of his association with his repressed identity of Jin Wang, nor is there any comprehension that Chin-Kee is in fact the Monkey King in another cultural disguise, so complete is their disassociation. The Danny/Chin-Kee storyline appears as though in a fugue state from the other narratives, unaware of its isolation. Yet, the work nonetheless implicitly connects each of the three storylines through its connective tissue. Cultural memories and repression The commencement of every chapter in American Born Chinese is marked by a title page that bears a centrally placed, red square stamp, known as a ‘chop’, of the episode’s main character; the Monkey King, Jin, and Cousin Chin-Kee, respectively. The title pages act as a reminder of the specific story-world the reader is about to enter, and their repetition provides an extra-diegetic reminder of the connectedness that persists between each of the storylines. The stamps are reminiscent of personal seals used in Tang Dynasty Chinese handscrolls – where painters, collectors, and occasionally viewers would ‘sign’ the images they encountered with the marks “conveying pride of authorship or ownership” (Delbanco 2000). As a signature, the seals involve the reader in the stories’ transmission as they enter and then exit each chapter.5 The seals are also present in multiple ways within each chapter; they are rendered in the smaller red marks at the top of each page – carrying inscriptions in written Chinese. More abstractly, the configuration of the panels on every page replicates the equilateral dimensions of the seals. The marks imbue the text with a historically and

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culturally specific reminder that subconsciously connects the work’s storylines, as they cohere the work through an ‘indelible’ stamp. At the start of the second chapter, readers meet the character of Jin for the first time as he tearfully plays with his Optimus Prime Transformer. The toy’s inclusion locates this storyline as taking place in the 1980s, as the American company Hasbro and the Japanese company Takara jointly produced the Transformers range from 1984 onwards. Both the nature of the toy itself and its trans-Atlantic production history fit the themes of Yang’s text; indeed, the desire for transformation is a serious affective impulse that spans the storylines between Jin, the Monkey King, and Danny. The tagline of the Transformers range, “more than meets the eye”, is fundamental to the narrative coherence behind American Born Chinese. In each of the three storylines, appearances are manipulated for one reason or another – and mostly, to fit in. The tagline will prove highly relevant to each of the characters and the way that the stories interlock with one another. Jin’s family has relocated from San Francisco’s Chinatown to a new residence in an undefined setting. On the drive, Jin’s mother recounts an “old Chinese parable”, which seems suitably modified for the purpose of their move (12). Here, the text offers a note that the story is translated from Mandarin Chinese, indicated by “”. Her story describes a mother and son who move from place to place, the son adopting his activities to fit in with the surroundings of each abode, such as a marketplace, a cemetery, and finally a university. After mentioning the latter, Jin’s mother recounts that, “[t]he son […] spent all his free-time reading books about mathematics, science, and history,” and that “[t]he mother and her son stayed there [in their home across the road from a university] for a long, long time”. Accompanying this tale, the reader is ushered into an imagined story world through the frames of thick sea-green panels rather than a black line, wherein the characters take on the guise of premodern Chinese dress. In the next panel, the caption states, “[s]he finished the story as we pulled up to our new house” (24), accompanying the image of a car parked in front of a house. The connection between Jin’s move and his mother’s story asks the reader to re-interpret the significance of the “old Chinese parable”, and to wonder whether his mother is weaving a story that serves multiple purposes – partly to reassure Jin that they will not be moving again for a long time, but also to encourage him in his studies. Indeed, the use of an “old Chinese parable” demonstrates a self-conscious deployment of this trope and embeds a particular re-construction of a cultural memory within a new setting. At a meta-textual level, the sense of play within this re-telling is reminiscent of Yang’s adaptation of the legend of the Monkey King in the preceding chapter as well as the cultural references within American Born Chinese more broadly. Yang has explained that Jin Wang’s name is derived from his own, noting that his parents were initially planning to call him Jin before changing it to a more Anglicised ‘Gene’, and that his surname has often been misspelled as ‘Wang’ (Barajas 2016).

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Jin recalls that shortly after their move he and his mother would visit a Chinese herbalist “every Sunday” where Jin would wait in the front room with the herbalist’s wife while his mother attended her appointment. On one occasion, the herbalist’s wife asks Jin what he plans to become when he grows up, and he replies “a Transformer!” (27), before showing her how the toy transforms into a truck. He goes on to explain that his mother has told him that “little boys don’t grow up to be transformers”, to which the shopkeeper enigmatically responds, “I’m going to let you in on a secret, little friend; it’s easy to become anything you wish…so long as you’re willing to forfeit your soul” (emphases in original 29). Following this Faustian revelation Jin sits in stunned silence while she counts bills on an abacus. There is a curious merging between the “click clack” of the abacus and the sound of the toy’s transformation. Specifically, as Jin demonstrates how his Transformer can change appearance over three panels, the second panel includes the words “click click clack” over the process of transformation. The placement of the sound effects provides an aural continuity that overlaps the shift from action to action, confusing which movement is producing the sound. The effect of this ambiguity is that it diminishes the division between the two characters and elevates the affective significance of the secret divulged. Overleaf, the story moves forward to Jin’s first day at Mayflower Lower Elementary, the name of the school recalling the Mayflower, a merchant ship that carried among its passengers the first ‘Pilgrims’ from England to the New World in 1620.6 The associations between the Mayflower’s mission, cultural homogeneity and a puritanical ethic are immediately felt in this scene, which also marks Jin’s entry into new territory. The teacher, Mrs Greeder, introduces Jin to the class, mispronouncing his name (“Jin Jang”, rather than “Jin Wang”). Mrs Greeder then informs the class that Jin’s family have recently arrived from China, rather than San Francisco. Jin corrects her on both counts, and his forlorn expression conveys the stress of this misinformation. The misapprehension of Jin’s identity continues as one of his classmates states, “My momma says Chinese people eat dogs”. The teacher’s response compounds the injurious nature of this statement, “Now be nice, Timmy! I’m sure Jin doesn’t do that! In fact, Jin’s family probably stopped that sort of thing as soon as they came to the United States!” (31). Her exhortation to Timmy belies an unspoken affirmation while presenting Jin and his family as a positive exception to this general rule. The impact of this assumption is referred to indirectly later in the story, when Chin-Kee is seen eating ‘crispy cat gizzards’ – itself an allusion to a 2001 cartoon by Pat Oliphant depicting Uncle Sam being served the same dish in a Chinese restaurant.7 Jin’s voiceover continues that “the only other Asian in my class was Suzy Nakamara”, and that they avoided one another “as much as possible” to distance themselves from school rumours that they are either related or arranged to be married (emphasis in original, 31). Here, the reader encounters another totalising discourse where ‘Asianness’ manifests itself as conflation of Chinese and Japanese identities wherein desire is presumed to reside.

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Two months later, a new student, Wei-Chen arrives, and another teacher misidentifies him as Chinese rather than Taiwanese, and also mispronounces his name. In this scene, which takes place in front of what appears to be a Geography class, there is a large map of North America in the background. Metonymically, this visual focus suggests ignorance about other parts of the world, reinforced by the teacher’s misunderstanding about Wei-Chen’s cultural background. The reader also learns that there is “something” about Wei-Chen that makes Jin want to “beat him up” (36) in a similar affective distancing to the way he avoids Suzy Nakamara’s company. The “something” that Jin feels gestures towards his identification with Wei-Chen, and his simultaneous rejection of his cultural identity. Indeed, we see this more explicitly soon after in the schoolyard where Jin tells off Wei-Chen for acting “like such an F.O.B!*” or “*Fresh off the Boat” (emphasis in original, 89). Wei-Chen responds thoughtfully, “Hm. This is true”, and then starts dating Suzy two weeks later. Notwithstanding Jin’s initial hostility, he and Wei-Chen become best friends, and their relationship will prove pivotal to both of their developments. Cousin Chin-Kee The antagonist in another storyline, Cousin Chin-Kee, is a serial threat who arrives, uninvited, whenever his cousin ‘Danny’ – who represents the transformed and assimilated version of Jin – establishes himself at a new school. As the return of the repressed, the seriality of Chin-Kee’s appearance ties into the cultural production of television sitcoms. He makes his first appearance via a television-screen title page with the ironic caption, “Everyone Ruvs Chin-Kee” unfurled across the middle of the screen. Chin-Kee’s head floats immediately below the title and the sound effect “CLAP CLAP CLAP CLAP […]” runs along the bottom panel. Immediately, this composition alerts readers that they are entering into a new discursive order – namely, that of the sitcom, complete with an audience sound track. The screen is distinctive because of its flatness, where the yellow title letters appear to sit almost flush with the faded blue-grey-green of the background. The square shape of the panel approximates the shape of a 1970s television screen, which suits the outdated title, where the misspelling of ‘loves’ alerts the reader to a problematic linguistic stereotype. The lack of visual depth foregrounds the stereotype of Chin-Kee, and the constraints of the sitcom; that is, despite his presence as a highly problematic stereotype who literally looms large over the other characters, the fictional audience and the others characters in this story world seem oblivious to his grotesque caricature. The font Yang uses for the title bears some resemblance to that used on movie posters for The Mysterious Dr. Fu Manchu (1929) among others. Yang thus pulls together filmic representations of stereotyped ‘Chinese’ identities, such as Fu Manchu to contribute another layer of signification with the character of Cousin Chin-Kee, who bears a deliberately provocative name.

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Given the emergence of the genre in the 1940s, and its rapid development in subsequent decades, it is perhaps not surprising that Yang chose to remediate Chin-Kee’s story through the generic conventions that structure situational comedies. Indeed, there are an abundance of historical and cultural afterlives that Chin-Kee iterates as Yang borrows from Chinese epics, American Idol, cinema, newspapers, and comic books, along with contemporary media to construct their parodic reiteration via a sitcom format. Comedy derives some of its power from pressing against the boundaries of human behaviour. In “Everybody Ruvs Chin-Kee”, laughter maintains an illusion that Chin-Kee’s deranged appearance is a gag, one into which the audience – both imagined and real – are interpolated. By utilising humour to reinforce difference, Yang places the reader in an uncomfortable position as they are aligned with the invisible studio audience. Another aspect of Chin-Kee’s invisibility is the way that none of the characters comments on his name, a deliberate play on the racial slur ‘chinky’. Instead, his peers and teachers appear to simply accept him as he is – or perhaps more accurately, he remains mostly unremarkable – only afforded a semblance of recognition when he upholds the role of a ‘model minority’ in the classroom, or sings the Ricky Martin song ‘She Bangs’ on a table-top in the school library, blissfully unaware of the shock with which his classmates look at him. Yang adapted the latter from a performance of the same song by William Hung on American Idol in 2004. Hung went on to record three albums and performed covers on American daytime shows, his performance occupying a liminal televised presence, gaining celebrity for his artless and awkward performance style. Another animating stereotype is Chin-Kee’s performance as a model student, which garners his teachers’ support. For example, in a Social Studies class, the teacher praises Chin-Kee’s academic performance, exclaiming, “Good Chin-Kee! Very good! You know people, it would behoove you all to be a little more ChinKee” (emphases in original 111). In a sequence spread over three pages, Yang portrays Chin-Kee in class with Danny, eagerly answering questions in their Geography, Human Biology, Math, Spanish, and then Chemistry and Literature classes. Across these pages, the reader faces Chin-Kee, who sits side-by-side with Danny in each class. The formal repetition of the classroom scene acts as a reminder in which stereotypes are essentialised through a single, repeated performance – in this case the construction of Asianness as a ‘model minority’. Here it is worth quoting from Jared Gardner in relation to Chin-Kee’s relentlessly outstanding performance in class: The dominant stereotype today of the Asian American as the inscrutable model minority has authorised a mounting hysteria on the part of today’s self-proclaimed native students (and their parents) regarding a new kind of mob taking over: Asian American children programmed by their parents for the Asian Invasion, ruthlessly stealing spots in elite universities and in the halls of power from other (white) children. (2010, 134)

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The deliberately repeated classroom perspective and placement of the laugh track over the figures of Chin-Kee and Danny mimics the flattening that takes place in terms of how the Asiatic ‘model minority’ is positioned as a marginalised ‘threat’, embedding the stereotype as a cultural memory, in much the same way as Japanese workers were seen as economic competitors in Kiyama’s The Four Immigrants Manga. It is only for Danny that Chin-Kee remains uncomfortably present – behaving as a social menace around Danny and his friends and as a sexual threat in relation to Amelia, Danny’s romantic interest. The lack of understanding about Chin-Kee not only as a character but also as a literary device has been replicated beyond the world of the text. As Yang notes, readers have had divergent responses to Chin-Kee; while older adults have reported finding the character painful to read, young adults have sometimes missed the layers of signification wrapped up in his character, asking where they can purchase Chin-Kee merchandise (Barajas 2016). Reflecting on this misunderstanding, Yang has commented that if he were to rewrite American Born Chinese, he would exaggerate Cousin Chin-Kee “even more”, to avoid any confusion about the purpose of the latter’s role as a provocative character (Barajas 2016). This cultural ignorance itself mimics the structure of the television sitcom. As Barry Langford suggests, “[w]hat above all distinguishes sitcom is its obsessive circularity” which induces a “particular amnesia, in which whatever lesson has been learnt one week is forgotten the next” such that the central premise of the narrative remains undisturbed (2005, 17). The reader can observe the “particular amnesia” in Danny’s complaint to a classmate, Steve, that his cousin Chin-Kee has been visiting him once a year since eighth grade for “a week or two”, where he “follows [Danny] to school, talking his stupid talk, and eating his stupid food”. Danny seems unaware of why Chin-Kee comes to visit, only that his stays “embarrass the crap out of me”, and eventually compel Danny to move schools at the end of each academic year (emphasis in original, 127). At this stage, Danny seems trapped in a serial purgatory, and his conversation with Steve resolves on a bitterly comedic note that simultaneously reveals that Chin-Kee had earlier urinated in Steve’s Coke, while demonstrating the slippage between Danny and Chin-Kee’s identity; Steve offers to buy a Coke for Danny, to which he responds, “Why, so I can pee in it?” (128). As Steve vomits into a garbage can, Danny stalks off, the laugh track staging a blithe response to the anguished conversation that has taken place. The laugh track signals the emergence of a particular form of cultural amnesia that obliterates the recognition of difference, triangulated through the sitcom genre. The laugh track can thus be understood as yet one more aspect of Jin/Danny’s fragmented character – the laughter does not seem to belong to anyone, but seems to speak both of Jin’s bewildered enchantment with ‘whiteness’ and his dissociation from his abjected self. The laughter also calls the reader to attention as we stand in for an imagined audience, asking us to question why the sitcom, and particularly Chin-Kee’s appearance invokes laughter. As Stella Oh suggests, by interpolating the audience into the laughter that “frames” Chin-Kee, Yang

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enables readers to experience shame as part of their reading, thereby opening a space to re-evaluate “the silent racism” (2017, 24) that remains pervasive today. The impact of laughter is foregrounded in an earlier storyline when the Monkey King attempts to attend a heavenly dinner party (14). Despite the Monkey King’s status as a deity, he is refused entry by one of the guards, who informs him that he cannot be admitted without shoes (15). The reader encounters a precursor of the laugh track that will accompany Chin-Kee’s appearance in the laughter of the gods who dismiss the Monkey King. Ashamed and outraged, he returns to his cave, only to detect, for the first time, the “thick smell of monkey fur” (emphasis in original, 20). The recognition of difference is instantiated through its social denigration, and its impact fundamentally shapes the rest of the Monkey King’s storyline. Jin, Danny, and Chin-Kee thus compose an ideational trifecta, with Danny and Chin-Kee respectively occupying the spaces of fantasy and disavowal. For Jin, his desire for a white self is realised after he dreams of the herbalist’s wife, with her invitation for transformation in exchange for the selling of one’s soul. The dream takes place after Jin alienates himself from both Wei-Chen and Suzy, and gives rise to three full-page panels where Jin stands in front of a mirror, his reflection revealing Danny, his idealised white self. The eventual aggression that motivates Danny to fight Chin-Kee is therefore not surprising, given his discomfort, dismay, and dread throughout all their interactions. In their extended fight sequence, the laugh-track builds throughout the action, before reaching a fever pitch as Chin-Kee menacingly tells Danny that he “ruvs Amellica” and that he will visit Danny every year “forever” (211). Against this flattened perspective, Chin-Kee’s speech balloons acquire an even more threatening aspect as they crowd close to Danny’s face. In the bottom half of the right-hand panel, the background darkens to black as the reader observes Danny’s fist shaking with fear and rage, and overleaf, the dominant panel maintains the black background as he punches ChinKee’s head with such force that it flies off the latter’s body. The real of the text now irrupts into the scene such that the imagined division between self and other crumbles beneath the affective weight of Jin’s torment. The laugh track comes to a sudden halt – “HA HA H-*” – the shock of the discovery disrupting its formulaic presence. The lower panel depicts the disarticulated head as a hollow dome, its interior partially visible. Readers now learn that Chin-Kee is the Monkey King in disguise – another evocation of “more than meets the eye”. Indeed, his presence operates as a phantom of repressed ‘Asian’ stereotypes that haunts Jin’s other Janus-face, Danny. The operating power behind Chin-Kee’s grotesquery resides solely on the surface, an amalgam of racist impressions of which he is a composite. The absence of depth tends to the superficial understanding of Chinese culture in some cultural memories. The consequent interruption to the chain of xenophobic representations breaks the presence of the laugh track, signifying the profound disruption of the genre and by extension the imaginary social arrangement of the text.

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At the conclusion of the story, readers learn that Wei-Chen is really the Monkey King’s eldest son, and retrospectively understand the significance of Wei-Chen’s toy robot – a gift from his father – that can change into a monkey (39). At the end of the work, Jin decides to spend a few hours at a local Chinese café where he haltingly reads the menu, which is written in Chinese. As Davis suggests, [b]y requiring his protagonist to make decisions regarding ethnic and cultural affiliation, Yang shows how children develop as individuals and within interpersonal relationships, underscoring the diversity of childhood and contradicting any tendency to essentialise the ‘Asian’ or ‘American’ subject. (2013, 10) Yang’s use of cultural memories and their afterlives allows him to query their legitimacy through each of the storylines. By remediating these stories via different visual technologies, he reveals the way that cultural memories are taken up by different modes of representation and housed within diverse media conventions. This speaks both to the forms that Yang utilises across film, television, and literature, most notably, as he uses them to disrupt cultural stereotypes. Most specifically, the sitcom acts as a metaphor for televised memory, characterised by its lack of depth, circularity, and cultural amnesia – symptomatically represented through the repeated appearance of Cousin Chin-Kee and the lack of cultural awareness that attends his presence. Within the pages of American Born Chinese, readers can read the affective and cultural contours and aftershocks of broader socio-political formations, such as the Chinese Exclusion Act, and other discriminatory laws and policies that contributed towards the (non)recognition of the Chinese subject within the imagined community of the United States, equally promulgated through mainstream media and art-forms. American Born Chinese directly addresses these issues, carried within the title itself, by offering an alternative visual archive that destabilises problematic iterations of Chinese identity by deploying particular forms of representation in a parodic, playful, and exploratory narrative mode.

Blue In modern Australia, a migrant country, the acceptance of migrants – and most particularly the acceptance of asylum seekers – is highly politicised. In recent decades, the arrival of asylum seekers by boat has been politicised in a way that frames immigration as a threat, in contrast to historical precedents such as the arrival of refugees following World War II, and earlier, the arrival of the British to the Australian mainland. This amnesiac approach has been deployed at the level of legislative and policy frameworks in the increased allocation of resources towards ‘border control’, and also through the removal of asylum seekers to offshore processing, themes that the next chapter of this book explores further. Discourses of nationhood are thus mobilised

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at different levels and, frequently, asylum seekers are themselves considered to be in jeopardy, not just in relation to the conditions which they flee but through the means by which they take flight – ruthless ‘people smugglers’, leaky boats, legal complexities. On the other side, risk is invoked by destination countries who feel they are the victims of this ‘external’ problem. Welfare systems might be strained, social cohesion threatened, national security compromised, borders flaunted – all these are imagined within the framework of otherness. Memory shapes Pat Grant’s Blue with regard to its aesthetic and formal concerns; the central character, Christian’s, uneasy nostalgia depicts a community vulnerable to the ravages of time, and the tension that permeates his story remains unresolved at its conclusion. The comic promulgates an imaginary record of the past, and like American Born Chinese, Blue recapitulates cultural and historical memories by constructing a story world that defamiliarises the representation of the ‘outsider’ to a fantastical extent. In contrast to Yang’s text however, Blue focusses on the xenophobic responses of a local character to difference. Grant is an Australian comics artist who lives in New South Wales, and the production of Blue was supported by his success in securing an Emerging Writers/Illustrators Grant from the Australia Council for the Arts.8 The book was self-published, with distribution and marketing undertaken by Giramondo Publishing (a literary small press) in Australia, and Top Shelf Productions in the United States. Lauded by Shaun Tan for its “pitch-perfect dialogue and composition” (Giramondo Publishing), and by Craig Thompson, who described Grant as “the Mark Twain of Australia” (Top Shelf Productions), Blue keenly identifies a discomfiting amalgam of fear, distrust, enthusiasm, and confusion among the community it depicts. The work specifically arose from Grant’s accidental presence at what became known as the ‘Cronulla riots’ in the southern Sydney beachside suburb of Cronulla. Mounting racial and ethnic tensions reached a climax on 11 and 12 December 2005, when large groups of self-identified ‘Anglo’ Australian men clashed with men of ‘Middle Eastern’ appearance. Prior to the violence, a widely circulated SMS within the former group incited, This Sunday every F—ing Aussie in the shire, get down to North Cronulla to help support Leb[anise] and Wog [general slur] bashing day … Bring your mates down and let’s show them this is our beach and they’re never welcomed back (sic). (Poynting 2007 cited in Bliuc et al., 2012, 2175) The shock and emotional fall-out from Cronulla pervades Grant’s story, where there is an anxious insistence on reclaiming the beach as a site of local identity.9 Grant’s witnessing of the events at Cronulla formed the genesis for two creative responses in Blue and an earlier online comic, “Waiting for Something to Happen: The Cronulla Race Riots”. This chapter argues that the production of the comic – first as a series of online installments, and then as a book –allowed Grant to produce a work that offers political commentary in a thoughtful and

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creative way. The story is told through the perspective of Christian, an economically marginalised street painter who spends his time painting over blue graffiti that proliferates all over the fictional town of Bolton. The story follows Christian’s adolescent memories and includes, among other things, his encounters with the ‘Blue people’ who have begun arriving in Bolton by boat. His reminiscences focus particularly on a day that he, and his friends Verne and Muck, play truant. Rob Reiner’s film Stand By Me (1986) was an influence on Grant, who wove some of its themes into his story, alongside his own memories of going to see a body on the tracks as a teenager. In the story, while Christian and his friends Verne and Muck set out to see a fictional body on the tracks, they change their minds, presumably overwhelmed by the gruesome facticity of the body. The reason for the change is not clearly articulated, and the ambivalence about this decision reflects Christian’s relationship with the past more generally. In hindsight, he wonders whether he “did the right thing” by avoiding seeing the body, “because I’m not sure that whatever there was for us to see up there, past the first tunnel, could have been as bad as what we didn’t see”. He adds, “I still can’t get that out of my head” (emphasis in original, np). I argue that the ‘that’ refers not only to the unseen body, but also the presence of the blue people, who trouble Christian and his friends’ notions about the ontologies of belonging. Underpinning Christian’s story is his confusion about how difference is constituted, how it is framed and understood, as well as the mutability of his memories. As Grant puts it, “[c]omic art seems to be the key that many people need to access a chamber of their psyche that is otherwise locked away from their adult consciousness” (np). Here, he formalises the experience of ‘otherness’ by drawing the blue people in the style of bowling pins with tentacles for arms and legs. They remain nameless, relegated to the category of other, and readers can observe how the comic maps the rejection of difference through this imagined archive of the past. The surreal characterisation of the blue people utilises the capacity of comics to visualise difference; their appearance sets them apart from the protagonist, and the local populace, who fail to recognise the differences that abound within themselves and their community. Local memories and melancholy In an essay on comics and surf culture included after the conclusion of Blue, Grant describes a memory of a similarly planned event to witness a decimated body on train tracks. Grant writes that “[m]y memory of this event brings up feelings of unease similar to those I get when I’m brooding over the themes of Blue”, including “localism, racism, and the creepy politics that play out in small town supermarkets and surf club car parks.” (“Genealogy of the Boofhead”) Indeed, there is a difficult mix of nostalgia, confusion, and tension that permeates Christian’s story. The decision not to see the body has created its own haunting, and there is a melancholic resonance that permeates his remembrance of the past. The colour scheme enlivens the downbeat

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register of Christian’s memories, the muted blue of the comic acting as a floating signifier of the blue people as well his pensive relationship to the past. Grant draws in an evocative aesthetic style that is reminiscent of early Australian surfing comics, with aspects of Theodor Seuss Geisel (Dr Seuss), and Hokusai’s wave-art forms woven into its visual tapestry. Christian’s uneasy nostalgia depicts an insular community vulnerable to the ravages of time. As he recalls, Bolton was purpose built only a few decades earlier to accompany an industrial plant, dreamt up by politicians as “the sort of place where lawns were mown, roads were smooth, women were pregnant and anyone looking for work was directed to the labour office in front of the plant” (np). The externalisation of social disadvantage as xenophobic resentment takes a familiar form in the narrative, “Look at em, sitting out here on the street sucking down noodles…and when they’re done they leave without picking up their rubbish…the place is a dump”. The story continues, “You know I grew up here don’t you?” before concluding, “things are different now” (np). Over the page, we see the middle-aged Christian, sitting on a milk crate, the wall behind him partially painted. A spotlight illuminates him as he continues: “You play ‘spot the Aussie’ down here these days…it’s funny, I can still remember the first time I seen one of those blue bastards…I was only little” (emphasis and ellipses in original, np). From here, the reader follows Christian’s figure back through time across a double spread sequence that depicts him getting ‘dumped’ by a wave, while tickets, stickers, photographs and other visual paraphernalia, such as a ticket to the popular music festival Big Day Out, line the top and bottom of the page. These historically specific products proudly display xenophobic messages like “Support it or f**k off”, “We grew here you flew here”, and “We’re full” placed within a sticker in the shape of the Australian continent. These signs are drawn from their real-world analogues, which proliferated with the rise of neo-conservatism during the Howard government (first elected in 1996) onwards. The presence of such symbols and icons explicitly sets and literally frame the ideological scene in which the narrative will unfold. Surfing looms large in the minds and mythology of Christian and his group, and discussions about surf conditions and legendary swells frequently pepper their conversations, although ironically we never see them surfing, outside of Christian’s imagination. The town of Bolton appears to be at risk – at least according to Christian’s narrative. The reader learns that the town was a 1989 Tidy Towns Winner, a Keep Australia Beautiful initiative to celebrate “sustainability achievements” across Australia.10 In the present, Christian laments, “you can’t even get a sausage roll in Bolton these days”, a signifier of the changing cultural and culinary landscape. He works as a street painter, an endless task as the town walls are constantly graffitied over by blue squiggles, which act as a visual reminder of the town’s change, and specifically the presence of the blue others, that he seeks to occlude from memory. The repeated appearance and disappearance of the graffiti recalls something of the fort/da game that Freud proposed as a means of processing

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the anxiety of loss. Indeed, from the commencement of Christian’s story, the graffiti troubles his assertions, offering ‘quieter’ counter-historical significations. For example, in one panel, Christian states “[y]ou know I grew up here don’t you?”, while the backdrop reminds the reader of a longer trajectory of Australian colonial history (Figure 2.1). In this panel, the central scene is reminiscent of Cook’s arrival at Botany Bay in 1771, with the Union Jack flying next to him and a boat to his left. Other figures crowd around, seemingly flattened and scattered around the ‘main’ event, which seems to stand in for Australia’s colonisation by the British, and the ruin that colonisation would bring upon local Indigenous populations. Grant uses the pictograph of a hand to represent the actions of the British Empire laying claim to the Australian mainland. Set adjacent to Christian’s claim that he “grew up” in Bolton, the visual message offers some parallel between the arrival of the blue people with that of the British by boat. The reader thus discovers that the differences between these pasts, while highly visible with regard to appearance, are not fixed in other ways, such as their shared mode of transportation to Australia by boat. This otherwise unacknowledged similarity between the two groups defamiliarises their relation to one another, such that their belonging may be regarded as equally precarious. Indeed, Christian’s statements are held within verbal nuclei located within ‘sea’ of visual messages that abut against his words, urging a consideration of other historical and cultural narratives that occupy the silences and gaps in his story. The absence of defined frames on this page

Figure 2.1 “Counter-narrative (detail)”. Pat Grant, Blue, 2012. Creative Commons Attribution. Image provided courtesy of Pat Grant.

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gestures towards Australia’s location as an island nation and the sense of vulnerability (real or imagined) against which Christian is seeking to defend his sense of identity. This anxiety brings to mind Judith Butler’s reflections on psychic wounding as a fundamental affective arrangement between self and other; “I am wounded, and I find that the wound itself testifies to the fact that I am impressionable, given over to the Other in ways that I cannot fully predict or control” (Precarious Life 2004, 46). The co-presence of Christian’s words and the blue scribbles utilises the surface of the comics page to record and register contradictory ideas about nationhood and the unpredictability of otherness. The distinctive shade of blue used throughout the work sets into motion a number of associations that intermingle to heighten the ambivalence of the narrative. Blue seems to at once signify Christian’s melancholic reserve, as he reflects on the past, as well as the ocean by which the Blue people arrive in Bolton. In an Australian context, the notion of ‘true blue’ (captured in 1986 by the folk singer John Williamson in an eponymous song) is slang for someone who represents the mythos of what it means to be Australian, and which acquires a particular valence in a neo-nationalist context that precipitated the production of Blue. Grant’s decision to colour the foreign characters blue signals a conscious choice to play with some of these associations, particularly in relation to nationalism and belonging, which carries the melancholic reminder of the expunged other. The design of the blue people invokes associations with racist representations of people from broadly ‘Asian’ backgrounds in Australian cultural history, perhaps most infamously associated with The Bulletin, which was published in Sydney between 1880 and 2008. During the magazine’s heyday between 1880 and 1918, it was known as “the bushman’s bible” due to its popularity with rural workers (Thompson 2013). At this time, The Bulletin supported the White Australia policy with its slogan “Australia for the White Man” (a change in 1908 from its original masthead, “Australia for the Australians”) and published racist cartoons targeting Asians, in particular Chinese and Japanese people, along with communities from Indian, Pacific Island and Jewish backgrounds. One 1886 cartoon featured a grotesque image of a Mongolian man’s head atop an octopus body (Figure 2.2). The octopus tentacles symbolise a range of threats to the imagined ‘white’ community of Australia, such as smallpox, opium, bribery, and immorality. Within its caricature, this image derives from racist portrayals of Chinese people that Yang parodies in the character of Chin-Kee. Grant retains the tentacled aspect of the representation of the blue people but houses them in an altogether fantastic creation designed to arouse readers’ empathy rather than repugnance. While the blue people look strange, so too do the locals; Grant depicts Christian, Muck, and Verne unsympathetically, with protruding teeth and strangely shaped heads. As Charles Hatfield suggests,

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Figure 2.2 “The Mongolian Octopus – his grip on Australia”. Philip May, The Bulletin, 21 August 1886. Courtesy of Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales.

[t]he fractured surface of the comics page, with its patchwork of different images, shapes, and symbols, presents the reader with a surfeit of interpretive options, creating an experience that is always decentered, unstable, and unfixable. (Alternative Comics 2005, xiv) Grant similarly affirms the potential for comics to deal with difficult issues, suggesting that, “[s]inking into the story space that comic art affords us – as cartoonists, but also as readers … leaves us exposed to raw, emotive readings of time, space and form” (“Genealogy of the Boofhead”). He adds “with comics it might be possible to say something new that hasn’t been said in critical language” (Dao 2012). Apprehending the ‘other’ The possibility of exploring the unknown through comics finds powerful expression in a sequence where Christian and his gang encounter a blue child at the train station. Grant depicts this encounter over four full pages, a testament to a fragile confusion that falls into the artificial solidity of racism.

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The sequence commences with a blue child breaking the fourth wall as he looks at the reader, and the next panel registers Christian, Verne, and Muck’s collective shock – depicted through their surprised features and stylised sweat beads – before the movement of the child past them. It seems that an elderly local couple has adopted this child, as they hold one of his striped tentacles. The group expresses shock at the appearance of the child, confused about his ethnicity and place of origin. Muck asks, “What are we supposed to call them?” to which Verne answers, “I don’t know, just blue people”. Muck wonders whether this term is racist, and Verne responds: “Maybe. They are blue though. How can it be racist if it’s true?” Soon, Christian joins the conversation, moving its tenor away from tentative wondering to aggression; “That kid was nothing like a curry muncher. He was more like a boong” (Figure 2.3). Here, the sequence focusses on Verne and Muck’s shocked expressions – which Grant depicts in an almost identical fashion as their response to the blue child. The next two panels move ‘down’ the page and respectively portray Christian’s smiling face, and then the others’ reflection of his smile. The transition in Verne and Muck’s response to Christian’s use of the term “boong” – a racial slur historically used to describe Aboriginal Australians, records a subtle movement of significance. Their initial response portrays apprehension and surprise as they look up at Christian on the train platform, before being

Figure 2.3 “Transition (detail)”. Pat Grant, Blue, 2012. Used under Creative Commons Attribution. Image provided courtesy of Pat Grant.

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reassured through the visual cue of his smiling face. The sequence thus conveys how Verne and Muck’s uncertainty is thwarted by Christian’s authoritative and racist declaration. This aggression is confirmed in the next panel, as Christian yells, “Go back to Oogetty Boong-land you ugly blue dickhead!” (np). Grant depicts this statement in a larger, heavier font than the text’s regular dialogue, and the violence of the speech is supported by the way the words escape the confines of the speech balloon. Christian’s posture, with feet raised slightly off the ground in a mild upward thrust, along with the spit bubbles that travel vigorously from his open mouth, strengthen the affective vehemence of his call. As the film scholar Tom Gunning suggests, “the power of comics lies in their ability to derive movement from stillness—not to make the reader observe motion but rather participate imaginatively in its genesis” (2014, 40). In the example above, the sense of movement is derived through the transition in the affective flow of the sequence. The “stillness” of the characters’ expressions allows the reader to wonder about the change, and the processes that inform it, thereby participating in the sense of movement (emotional and physical) within the text. In itself, this requires attention from the reader, and an ability to speculate how the text drives their reading. One advantage, then, of reading comics, is that they generally require – at one time or another – the reader to slow down their reading, or to move back and forth between panels as they accumulate meaning within the text. Grant uses the phrase “the slow drama of life” to describe his comics, and this slowing down is recreated in the ambulatory pace of the narrative and, more generally, by the way that the physical dimensions of each frame are tailored to support the action contained therein. In the sequence described above, the portraits of Verne and Muck’s shock remains in situ so that the reader can simultaneously observe this moment within its narrative context. The moment remains present, even while it is understood as a past event. While film, literature, and other art forms also allow their viewers and readers the ability to become submerged in the text, comics are unique in their sequential qualities because of the way they traverse and hold time across the surface of the physical page. As Art Spiegelman observes, these features make comics ideally suited to represent memory because they allow the reader to flit between the past and present, while being conscious of an overall sequence, as depicted in Figure 0.1. Christian and his friends are ineluctably drawn to the train line that lies beyond Bolton and around which the story reaches its (anti)-climax. Christian explains, “I don’t know what it was about the line but when we were young we found it irresistible” (np), and the action soon moves there. The line offers “something different”, beyond the manicured and highly surveyed streets of Bolton, and the razor wire that delimits the rail corridor paradoxically provides privacy once the kids move within its confines. Around the track, Grant depicts the Banksia vegetation in the manner of the woodcuts of Margaret Preston, their distinctive flowering spikes mingling with other swirling vegetation. These flora contrast with the rounded iris-like forms of vegetation within Bolton, which provide a ‘natural’ analogue to the prominent surveillance cameras in

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the town. The formalism of the town vegetation enhances the cramped representation of Bolton, and the reader encounters a sense of relief not unlike that of the group when they move into the rail corridor. Here, the group encounters a teenage girl, who has stopped attending school altogether. After they mention the purpose of their visit to the tracks, to “have a look at the spot where the dead guy was”, she mentions that they will know where the body is “‘cause the tracks are all blue” (np). When Muck asks why the tracks are “Blue?” (emphasis in original), her stance and intonation mirrors that of Christian’s, and her response is similarly aggressive: “[b]ecause of all the blood you dopey little faggot!”. Grant captures Muck’s dismayed response, “Oh”, with a close-up of his face, worry-lines furrowing his brow. The girl has revealed that the body on the tracks belongs to a blue person. Whereas up until now, the imagined body parts have been visualised in sepia, from this point the visual register codes Christian’s memories of the body in blue. Alongside their banter and slang, Verne, Muck, and Christian display quieter responses such as fear, confusion, and trepidation, qualities that reveal more contemplative and thoughtful moments. Grant takes the time to depict these expressions in panels that are frequently unaccompanied by dialogue, or by Christian’s reminiscence. This provides the reader with an opportunity to wonder about what remains unspoken, much like the decision to not approach the body on the train tracks. The group soon approaches the place where the body lays. As they walk along the tracks, Christian and Muck slow down, leaving Verne ahead. After Christian calls out to Verne, Grant inserts the remembered image of the blue child the group encountered earlier. The communication between the three now slows down, becoming monosyllabic, until Muck calls out to Verne, “[l]et’s just go back”. They walk back in silence until they meet another group of youths to whom they supply false impressions, “Yeah, we seen it”, “It’s heaps festy, ay”. As Christian reflects, “[w]hen you start telling stories about your life, things seem more clear cut than when you were living it”. Indeed, the silences that punctuate the denouement leave much unsaid, but the remembrance of the blue child offers a significant moment of apprehension for the group. It seems, perhaps for the first time, they have recognised the would-be body of the other as something that they must confront, and grieve for, rather than an object that was afforded no liveliness (in their eyes) to begin with. This shift in thinking – the partial recognition of what I earlier described as the gruesome facticity of the dead body – is perhaps what stops the group from proceeding, unable to confront a body that has hitherto not been recognised as one. This returns us to Butler’s suggestion that “there are ‘subjects’ who are not quite recognizable as subjects, and there are ‘lives’ that are not quite—or, indeed, are never—recognised as lives”. (Frames of War 2009, 4) Drawing a distinction between “apprehension” and “recognition”, Butler argues that if a life is not recognised as such, then its loss cannot be grieved. By contrast, while apprehension is “bound up with sensing and perceiving” it is not always a conceptual form of knowledge (5). For Butler, “precariousness underscores

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our radical substitutability and anonymity in relation both to certain … modes of dying and death and to other socially conditioned modes of persisting and flourishing”. (14) The notion of “radical substitutability” is visually accessible in Blue as Grant places images of the group, and the blue child, in succession (Figure 2.4). The remembered image of the blue child interrupts their mission, and this unspoken recognition seems to prevent them from feasting their eyes on the tragic scene. I suggest that this moment instantiates a precariousness which finds itself expressed in the melancholic quality of Christian’s memories. The understanding that a life has been lost is only possible when its subject is recognisable, and the remembered image of the blue child provides this fragile, but significant, understanding. The absence of a border around the remembered image of the blue child emphasises the permeability of Christian’s memories. Far from being forgotten, the reader can literally observe the presence of a foreign presence in his visual recollection of the past. In this sequence, the blue child’s expression becomes mournful, even accusatory, as we identify Christian’s ambivalence in the present about his decision not to see the body. In the final sequence, Christian walks away from a freshly painted wall, and as he does so, a blue person comes around the corner, and starts drawing on the wall in now-familiar blue graffiti. Grant suggests that “[i]n Bolton the walls are […] a symbolic battle ground for competing cultural interests like

Figure 2.4 “Recognition (detail)”. Pat Grant, Blue, 2012. Used under Creative Commons Attribution. Image provided courtesy of Pat Grant.

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they are in any city full of stickers, tags, advertising, murals, signage and of course the squares of […] paint that guys like Christian like to put up everywhere”. In this sequence, the graffiti is suggestive of a ‘life after’ Christian’s story, where the desire to draw remains, even when earlier efforts have been painted over. The re-appearance of the graffiti also provides a visual sense of continuity, and a sense of liveliness that continues in the town of Bolton, even as it departs from Christian’s memories of the place from his youth. Christian’s story is marked by hesitation, frustration, and disenchantment. His ambivalence towards the past – equal parts nostalgia and regret – registers the stasis that sits at the heart of the town’s racism. From what we see, the town rarely risks engagement with the blue foreigners – they are depicted as being locked up and disparaged, and Christian and his friends remain similarly insulated from the broader community. Yet this is not the full story, as we observe the ways in which the blue ‘others’ have a relational impact within the town of Bolton. This is observable through the aesthetic representation of the town, as well as the youths’ responses to the blue people. As in the railway scene, the presence of the blue people is felt, and visible, throughout the narrative, despite some locals’ attempts to disavow their being. The narrative concludes on an uncertain note; as Christian walks away from the freshly painted wall, his feelings seemingly remain unresolved. The open-ended conclusion to the story means that readers can contemplate different possibilities that might unfold in Bolton’s event horizon, maintaining a “structure of uncertainty”, to use Ulrich Beck’s phrase. The mechanics that structure Blue supports such a reading, by maintaining the irresolution of the past within the present. To this end, blue – as a pigment and a floating signifier – productively colours not only the body of the foreign inhabitants and the waves around Bolton, but also the melancholic relation that Christian’s past bears for him.

Conclusion In Blue and American Born Chinese, the protagonists bear an uneasy relation to their internal and external apprehension of ‘otherness’, marked particularly by tensions around racial identity and belonging. Both texts critique memories of particular, and problematic cultural pasts, conjoining them in new textual settings. Their defamiliarisation invites readers to reflect critically on how they engage with representations of difference. By acting as a space of absence, the gutters allow readers to contribute to the recognition of these kinds of cultural inheritances as they project their interpretations of each text into the breach. The next chapter continues exploring the theme of traumatic alienation, configured within individual, and national domains, and particularly its relationship with humour in Persepolis (2003/2004) by Marjane Satrapi.

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Notes 1 For further reading, see Adrian Tomine’s response to this character in “The Donger and Me” (2001). 2 For further reading online, see webcomics such as Secret Asian Man by Tak Toyoshima and Angry Little Asian Girls by Lela Lee. 3 For a useful discussion on the history of Fu Manchu’s appearance (and disappearance) in films produced in the United States, and broader cultural legacy, see Christopher Murray, Champions of the Oppressed: Superhero Comics, Popular Culture, and Propaganda in America During World War II, pp. 214–229. 4 Davis offers another set of visual resonances between American Born Chinese and the style of Archie comics from the 1960s, and Hanna-Barbera cartoons from the 1980s such as Scooby Doo (12). 5 For further discussion on the role of seals as markers of transmission in Chinese handscrolls, see Maxwell K. Hearn How to Read Chinese Paintings. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2008. 6 Lan Dong makes a similar observation in relation to the settlement rather than the ship, namely, the “deliberate reference to the English pilgrim settlement in Massachusetts in 1620 that calls for the reader’s attention to the United States’ immigration history” (2011, 238). 7 For a full discussion of this reference, please see the interview with Yang in Barajas. 8 ‘Pat Grant’s Blue’, Surfing Life (4 July 2011), available at http://www.surfinglife. com.au/news/sl-news/9264-pat-grant’s-blue (accessed 12 December 2016). 9 For a sociological discussion of the significance of beaches in Australian culture, and specifically in relation to the Cronulla Riots, see Bliuc et al., “Manipulating National Identity: The Strategic Use of Rhetoric by Supporters and Opponents of the ‘Cronulla Riots’ in Australia”. Ethnic and Racial Studies 35.12(2012): 2174– 2194; and Anthony Redmond, “Surfies versus Westies: Kinship, Mateship and Sexuality by Supporters and Opponents of the ‘Cronulla Riots’ in Australia”. The Australian Journal of Anthropology 18.3 (2007): 336–50. The littoral zone also occupies an important location in the Australian literary context. For example, see CA Cranston and Robert Zellor (Eds), The Littoral Zone: Australian Writers and their Contexts. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. 10 kab.org.au.

Bibliography Assman, Jan, and John Czaplicka. “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity”. New German Critique 65. Spring – Summer (1995): 125–133. Print. Barajas, Joshua. “This Chinese-American Cartoonist Forces us to Face Racist Stereotypes” 30 September 2016. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/art/this-chinese-america n-cartoonist-forces-us-to-face-racist-stereotypes/. Accessed 22 January 2019. Web. Beck, Ulrich. “Living in the World at Risk”. Economy and Society 35. 3(2006): 329–345. Print. Bliuc, Ana-Maria, et al. “Manipulating National Identity: The Strategic Use of Rhetoric by Supporters and Opponents of the ‘Cronulla Riots’ in Australia”. Ethnic and Racial Studies 35. 12(2012): 2174–2194. Print. Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? London: Verso, 2009. Print. Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso, 2004. Print. Cranston, C.A. and Robert Zellor (eds). The Littoral Zone: Australian Writers and their Contexts. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. Print.

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Dao, Andre. “Interview with Pat Grant: Author of ‘Blue’”. 10 June 2012. rightnow. org. Accessed 28 April 2016. Web. Daria. Glenn Eichler and Susie Lewis. MTV Networks, 1997–2001. DVD. Davis, Rocío G. “Childhood and Ethnic Visibility in Gene Yang’s American Born Chinese”. Prose Studies 35. 1(2013): 7–15. Print. Delbanco, Dawn. “Chinese Handscrolls”, in Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. April 2008. http://www.metm useum.org/toah/hd/chhs/hd_chhs.htm. Accessed 9 July 2017. Web Dong, Lan. “Reimagining the Monkey King in Comics: Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese”, in Oxford Handbook of Children’s Literature. Eds Julia Mickenberg and Lynne Vallone. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011: 231–251. Print. Gardner, Jared. “Same Difference: Graphic Alterity in the Work of Gene Luen Yang, Adrian Tomine, and Derek Kirk Kim”, in Multicultural Comics: From Zap to Blue Beetle. Ed. Frederick Luis Aldama. Austin, TX: The University of Texas Press, 2010: 132–147. Print. Ghost in the Shell. By Shirow Masamune. Dir. Rupert Sanders. Perf. Scarlett Johansson, Pilou Asbæk, Takeshi Kitano, et al. Paramount Pictures, 2017. DVD. Grant, Pat. Blue. Melbourne: Giramondo Press, 2012. Print. Grant, Pat.“Genealogy of the Boofhead: Images, Memory and Australian Surf Comics”, in Blue (np). Print. Grant, Pat. “Waiting for Something to Happen: The Cronulla Race Riots” (2007). http:// www.patgrantart.com/content/waiting/waiting.html. Accessed 28 April 2016. Web. Gunning, Tom. “The Art of Succession: Reading, Writing, and Watching Comics”. Critical Inquiry 40. 3(2014): 36–51. Print. Hatfield, Charles. Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature, Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 2005. Print. Hatfield, Charles. “Redrawing the Comic-Strip Child: Charles M. Schultz’s Peanuts as Cross-writing”, in Oxford Handbook of Children’s Literature. Eds Julia Mickenberg and Lynne Vallone. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011: 167–187. Print. Hearn, Maxwell K. How to Read Chinese Paintings. New York: Met Publications, 2008. Print. Jaybee, Tony. “DC Comics’ Chinese Superman to Face 1930s Yellow Peril Caricature Ching Lung”. 9 February 2017. weareresonate.com. Accessed 7 August 2017. Web. Keep Australia Beautiful. kab.org.au. Accessed 29 May 2018. Web.Langford, Barry. “‘Our Usual Impasse’: The Episodic Situation Comedy Revisited”, in Popular Television Drama: Critical Perspectives. Eds Jonathan Bignell and Stephen Lacey. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2005: 15–33. Print. Lee, Lela. Angry Little Asian Girls. http://www.angrylittleasiangirl.com/. Accessed 23 June 2018. Web. MacArthur Foundation. “Gene Luen Yang”. macfound.org. Accessed 29 May 2018. Web. Murray, Christopher. Champions of the Oppressed: Superhero Comics, Popular Culture, and Propaganda in America During World War II. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, Inc., 2010. Print. Oh, Stella. “Laughter Against laughter: Interrupting Racial and Gendered Stereotypes in Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese”. Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 8. 1(2017): 20–32. Print. Redmond, Anthony. “Surfies versus Westies: Kinship, Mateship and Sexuality in the Cronulla Riot”. The Australian Journal of Anthropology 18. 3(2007): 336–350. Print.

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Stand By Me. Dir. Rob Reiner. Perf. Wil Wheaton, River Phoenix, Corey Feldman, et al. Columbia Pictures Corporation, 1986. DVD. Rohmer, Sax [Arthur Henry Ward]. The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu. New York: McBride, 1913. Print. S. Res. 201 (2011). Sixteen Candles. Dir. John Hughes. Perf. Molly Ringwald, Anthony Michael Hall, Justin Hall, et al. Universal Pictures, 1984. DVD. Song, Min Hyoung. “How Good It Is to Be a Monkey”: Comics, Racial Formation, and American Born Chinese”. Mosaic 43. 1(2010): 73–92. Print. The Mysterious Dr. Fu Manchu. Dir. Rowland V. Lee. Perf. Warner Oland, Neil Hamilton, Jean Arthur et al. Rowland V. Lee Productions/Paramount Pictures, 1929. DVD. Thompson, Stephen. “1910 The Bulletin Magazine”. January 2013. http://www.migra tionheritage.nsw.gov.au. Accessed 23 November 2017. Web. Tomine, Adrian. “The Donger and Me” (2001). https://www.npr.org/programs/atc/fea tures/2008/mar/in_character/donger_1.html?t=1548497648242. Accessed 26 January 2019. Web. Toyoshima, Tak. Secret Asian Man. http://secretasianmancomics.blogspot.com/. Accessed 23 June 2018. Web. Transformers. David Wise et al. Sunbrow Productions, 1984–1987. DVD. Ty, Eleanor. The Politics of the Visible in Asian North American Narratives. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. Print. Walfred, Michele. “Queue”. https://thomasnastcartoons.com/2014/04/01/queue/. Accessed 1 August 2017. Web. Yang, Gene Luen. “Printz Award Winner Speech”. Young Adult Library Services 6. 1 (2007): 11–13. Print. Yang, Gene Luen. American Born Chinese. New York: First Second, 2006. Print.

Further reading Chiu, Monica. Drawing New Color Lines: Transnational Asian American Graphic Narratives. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2015. Print. Doughty, Jonathan. “More Than Meets the ‘I’: Chinese Transnationality in Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese”. Asian American Literature: Discourses and Pedagogies 1(2010): 54–60. Print. Fu, Binbin. “Review of American Born Chinese”. MELUS 32. 3(2007): 274–276. Print. Hathaway, Rosemary V. “‘More than Meets the Eye’: Transformative Intertextuality in Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese”. The ALAN Review 37. 1(2009): 41– 47. Print. Kunyosying, Kom. “The Interrelation of Ethnicity, Iconicity, and form in American Comics”. PhD Thesis. University of Oregon, 2011. Accessed 21 Sep. 2017. Web. Margolis, Rick. “American Born Chinese”. Interview with Gene Luen Yang. School Library Journal (September 2006): 41. Print. Mayer, Ruth. Serial Fu Manchu: The Chinese Supervillain and the Spread of Yellow Peril Ideology. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2013. Print. McCloud, Scott. Reinventing Comics: How Imagination and Technology Are Revolutionizing an Art Form. New York: William Morrow Paperbacks, 2000. Print. Nabizadeh, Golnar. “The Afterlife of Images: Archives and Intergenerational Trauma in Autobiographic Comics”, in Mapping Generations of Traumatic Memory in American

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Trauma Narratives. Eds Dana Mihailescu, Roxana Oltean, and Mihaela Precup. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014: 171–190. Print. Oki, Emma. “They All Look Alike? Representations of East Asian Americans in Adrian Tomine’s Shortcomings and Scenes from an Impending Marriage”, in Representing Multiculturalism in Comics and Graphic Novels. Eds Carolene Ayaka and Ian Hague. London: Taylor & Francis, 2014: 228–239. Print. Oziewicz, Marek and Emily Midkiff. “The ‘Asian Invasion’: An Interview with Gene Luen Yang”. The Lion and the Unicorn 38. 1(2014): 123–133. Print. Schieble, Melissa. “Reading Images in American Born Chinese through Critical Visual Literacy”. English Journal 103. 5(2014): 47–52. Print. Smith, Philip. “Postmodern Chinoiserie in Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese”. Literature Compass 11. 1(2014): 1–14. Print. Stratman, Jacob. “‘How Good it is to be a Monkey’: Conversion and Spiritual Formation in Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese”. Christianity & Literature 65. 4(2016): 490–507. Print. Vizzini, Ned. “High Anxiety”. The New York Times. 13 May 2007. Web.

3

Narrating trauma in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis

Introduction This chapter explores the representation of memory, humour and trauma in Marjane Satrapi’s “autographic” memoir, Persepolis (2003/4).1 Influenced by Art Spiegelman’s Maus (2003), and David B[eauchard]’s Epileptic (2005), Satrapi’s comic addresses subjects such as revolution, war, and the politics of identity through an iconic visual style. Like both Spiegelman and Beauchard (the latter acting as a mentor for Satrapi), she uses the comic form to explore the interface between personal and cultural memories, describing Persepolis as a text that bears witness to both elements. In an interview, she explains, “I was born in a country in a certain time, and I was witness to many things. I was a witness to a revolution. I was a witness to war. I was witness to a huge emigration. I was a witness when I came back” (Leith 2004). Satrapi also confirms the commemorative function of the work in the book’s preface, stating, “I also don’t want those Iranians who lost their lives in prisons defending freedom … or who were forced to leave their families and flee their homeland to be forgotten” (PI np, ellipsis in original). Through its emphasis on the importance of witnessing, the narrative testifies to the significance of lesser known (in a Western context) counter-historical narratives about Iran’s political history in the twentieth century, entwined with the lived experiences of individuals and families before and after the 1979 Revolution.2 Translated from French, the first English edition of Persepolis consists of two volumes: Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood (2003) and Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return (2004). The first volume depicts the author’s childhood avatar set against the 1979 Revolution and the Iran–Iraq War, which lasted almost 8 years between 1980 and 1988. As the story commences, the reader is introduced to Marji as a schoolgirl, the daughter of a middle-class family, whose school has recently been compelled to wear the veil under the dictates of the new Islamic Government. The first volume traces the contours of Marji’s life and her growing political consciousness in her family home, as well as in public, two domains subject to scrutiny and surveillance by the new regime. From its opening pages, her story depicts the tensions that structure life after the Revolution, pressures conveyed through its iconic, stark,

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monochromatic aesthetic, and which also find expression through the frequent use of humour and satire, narrative modes also found in Kiyama’s The Four Immigrants Manga, Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese, and Epileptic by David B., which forms the focus of the next chapter. The narrative tone of Persepolis – explanatory, assured, humorous – allows it to perform as a consciousness raising work, while retaining a melancholic aesthetic sensibility. The frequently brutal events of the narrative are amplified within the diegesis via the stylised monochrome images, such as when Marji visits her Uncle Anoosh in prison, his last visitor before he is executed (PI, 69). The severe lines of the prison cell coupled with Marji’s dramatic shadow augment the horror of this event. These details provide a gripping contrast to the simplicity of the sub-title to Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood. The second volume traces Marjane’s coming-of-age in Vienna, which includes learning German, her introduction to drugs and amorous-sexual relations. Her time in Vienna reaches a point of crisis as she becomes homeless for several months, before deciding to return to Iran, where, following on from two failed suicide attempts and a divorce, she eventually leaves in permanent self-imposed exile to France in 1994. It is from this exilic position that Satrapi writes of her youth and the complexities that constitute her Iranian identity. Since the 1970s, women’s life writing has been significantly augmented by the production of graphic memoirs such as the underground anthology, The Complete Wimmen’s Comix (Robbins (ed) 2016), and more recently, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragi-Comic (2006), Julie Doucet’s My New York Diary (2011), and Aline Kominsky-Crumb’s Need More Love (2007). The use of humour throughout Persepolis connects the text to these works, where the respective artists use comedic inflections such as parody, slapstick, and wry commentary to represent their lives in thoughtful and generative ways. These works demonstrate the ability of visual narratives to agitate, inform, and unsettle assumptions about women’s lives and their histories, while representing those histories in new and visually arresting ways. Bechdel, for example, meticulously traces over old diary entries to re-historicise her childhood, whereas Kominsky-Crumb utilises a mixed-media format to chart the conflicting messages she received about femininity and sexuality as a young woman. In each case, the author’s personal approach to narration informs the aesthetic design of the text, and the personalised field of vision usefully historicises each author’s respective account of their experiences. The complex feelings in each autographic work, such as feelings of shame and guilt about sexuality, suicide, and disease, are literally given space for visualisation, a process that generates creative interventions into understanding survival and identity formation. Satrapi’s visual style is informed by her training in fine arts in Iran and Europe and incorporates distinct influences, such as German Expressionist film, as well as traditional elements from Iranian “miniature” paintings. These influences are not only significant in terms of their visual construction but also their cultural import. For example, as Marie Ostby suggests, “Satrapi adapts a frame-breaking aesthetic that dates back to the eleventh century, a

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contrapuntal process of defamiliarisation in which visual vocabulary both in and out of the frame compensates for some of the limitations of verbal language”. She continues that, “Persian miniatures themselves exist in a web of transnational origin and circulation stories, and some of Persepolis’s stylistic elements can be read as a contemporary continuation of that network” (2017, 562). Satrapi incorporates Persian miniature painting and its conventions into the book’s form, so that it speaks to multi-directional forms of cultural memory – Persian and Western. By utilising an abstracted, non-realistic mode of representation, Satrapi augments the significance of particular details through their iconic abstraction. The apparent simplicity of the aesthetic design is evident through the work. Satrapi has explained that she grappled with how to depict violence in Persepolis, given that representations of violent events have become “so normal, so banal,” despite their depiction of occurrences which in themselves are “not normal” at all (Hajdu 2004, 35). Satrapi suggests that for contemporary readers who can readily access images that portray violence in hyper-real detail, the portrayal of a personal history in the same graphic style may only contribute to the banality that haunts modern images of violence. She thus chose to depict the horror of violence in monochrome, stating, “[b]lack and white makes [violence] more abstract and more interesting” (Hajdu 2004, 35). As Ann Cvetkovich observes, the use of black and white in Persepolis demonstrates “testimony’s power to provide forms of truth that are emotional rather than factual” (2008, 114). Here, the reader is afforded access to affective truths that have been written out of formal historical narratives through the text’s deceptively simple mode of representation. The dramatisation of loss and melancholy is evident throughout Persepolis in the way that Satrapi plays with the monochromatic colour scheme to carve out absences that are figured in both black and white, as well as the way that she utilises spatio-visual compression to render the past alongside the present in what would otherwise be an impossible arrangement. Satrapi’s representation of the past utilises a non-mimetic record of traumatic memories in terms of their gestural significance, which is also evident in David Small’s Stitches (2009), the subject of Chapter 5. In other words, the way in which details are frequently occluded from the image speaks of the traumatic nature of the event through an abstract visual lexicon. A particular articulation of this strategy is the use of the singular to stand in for the mass. For example, before leaving Iran for the final time – at the end of the second volume – Marjane visits her uncle Anoosh’s grave behind Evin Prison. At a site notorious for the number of political prisoners who were executed, Anoosh’s body lies in an unmarked grave behind the prison, “next to thousands of other cadavers” (PII, 186).3 The panel depicts Marjane kneeling in front of an unmarked grave, its presence noted only nominally by what may be a bunch of flowers, or a patch of grass. The distance between her figure and the presence of a single car in the mid-ground conjures a sense of spaciousness through their alignment. Indeed, the blankness of the ground around her provides a horrifying

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contrast to the reader’s knowledge that her uncle’s body lies next to “thousands of other cadavers”. That is, the emptiness in front of Evin speaks of the difficulty of representing the enormous losses sustained by the population as many people were killed, tortured, and disappeared by the regime. Writing on the link between blank spaces, whiteness, and the “anxiety of deletion” (255) in sequential narratives, Xavier Marcó Del Pont posits that the “whiteness of the blank panel is not sterile, but pregnant with meaning and possibility” (2012, 262). The blankness of the space around Evin Prison belies its ongoing and historical significance as a site of deprivation, cruelty, and death. The lone shadows cast by Marjane and the car, I suggest, amplify the emotional tension generated by the disparity between the words and images in this panel. Del Pont’s contemplation on whether the use of blank spaces in comics may “inspire in the reader a reaction at the level of object permanence, a sort of Freudian Fort/Da, a Peekaboo effect that enables us to rehearse loss” (254). In this scene, the permanence of loss is rendered through the absence of signification in the prison’s grounds. To use trauma theorist Cathy Caruth’s translation, Fort/da may be understood as “departure/return” (Pozorski 2006, 79), which itself mimics the movement of migration. The scene anticipates the trauma of Marjane’s final departure from her homeland. Thus departure is left without its dyadic partner, so that the revelation of loss is revealed through the lack of return, reflected here in the blank space that also reflects her uncle’s absence. The text derives its power not only from the use of white space but also, like The Four Immigrants Manga, from its humour, which includes irony, parody, and sarcasm. Gillian Whitlock similarly notes that “Satrapi’s Persepolis turns to […] irony and satire as modes for telling her story of childhood and subsequent exile from Iran after the revolution of 1979” (Soft Weapons 2007, 188). In The Origin of German Tragic Drama [1928], Walter Benjamin provides a metaphor for the relationship between comedy and mourning. He writes, “the pure joke is the essential inner side of mourning which from time to time, like the lining of a dress at the hem or lapel, makes its presence felt” (125–126). Benjamin’s metaphor conveys the intimate residence of humour within mourning. Satrapi has commented on the use of humour as a cross-cultural interface, “[t]o be able to laugh with someone is … to be able to touch the soul of somebody” (ellipsis in original, “Images of her Homeland”). There are various case studies on the use of humour as a support mechanism for survival under traumatic circumstances. Examples include Rudolph Herzog’s (2011) exploration of the dissemination of jokes in Nazi Germany via newspaper cartoons, cinema, cabaret, and popular songs, among other cultural forms, while Mark McKinney (2013) examines the use of caricature in archives of French colonialism in Algeria and Vietnam as a testament to their traumatic legacies. Common to these analyses is the way that humour jostles against the threat of annihilation. As Valerie Holman and Debra Kelly explain, as a catalyst for the “imaginative life of peoples at war”, humour also plays a “similar role in re-engaging present-day readers, viewers and listeners with the experience of previous generations” (2001, 254).

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Satrapi describes the subversive, and sustaining power of humour, “[w]hen you go through war and revolution, the only thing you can do is laugh. It’s a way of surviving” (Walter 2004). This is immediately apparent in the book’s opening pages, where Satrapi depicts the introduction of the veil.4 She locates her childhood avatar, Marji, and classmates playing with their headscarves in the school yard, a playful and parodic mode of representation that invests the scene with dynamism as the girls’ statements [“Giiddyap!”, “Give me my veil back!”, “You’ll have to lick my feet!”(3)], combine to portray a busy playground setting. The students use their veils as a skipping rope, rein, and cloak, respectively, while Marji removes hers because it’s “too hot”. In the centre of the panel, one girl wearing the veil pretends to throttle a classmate while declaring “Execution in the name of freedom!”. This statement acquires a more sinister inflection because of the contextual information Satrapi’s introduction provides, and foregrounds the widespread executions to which the story refers. This scene also demonstrates the students’ growing awareness of the ruptures that have begun to permeate their lives and an indirect awareness of their absurdity. To the non-Iranian reader, it also introduces the veil as a feature marked by girls’ heterodox responses to the garb. Similar to The Photographer, discussed in the next chapter, the representation of the veil in Persepolis generates an active consideration of its meaning for the people who come to wear it, whether by choice or compulsion. In an episode from Persepolis I entitled “The Key”, the caption explains that soon after the Revolution, Marji and her classmates must line up “twice a day to mourn the war dead” and as funeral marches are played, they beat their breasts in a show of grief (PI 95).5 The caption contextualises their display in relation to religious proceedings, revealing the book’s pedagogical impulse. In the full-page panel, the girls are depicted at the moment their hands make contact with their chests, the jagged impact lines indicating the force of impact. Against a black background, their expressions – fixed in a glaze of enforced mourning – create a stark image of shallow grief. The tessellated contours of the girls’ hijabs correlate with the oppressive conditions of this prescribed mourning and the flat design of this panel speaks to the flattened affect that the schoolgirls express in their public display of grief. As she does in the earlier school yard scene, Satrapi draws attention to the way in which this apparent compliance with authorial forces contains resistance within it. Through her use of tessellation (visible in both volumes of Persepolis), Satrapi also draws on a cultural form that is particularly distinctive to Islamic art and architecture, and recapitulates its significance to underscore the conformity in these mourning rituals.6 The shallow performative modality of mourning antithetically attests to the largely unconscious grief the girls feel under the strictures of the Islamic regime. As they adjust to the new ritual of mourning which becomes part of the fabric of school life, the students begin to parody this display of enforced grieving. Marji in particular parrots popular phrases associated with this form of public mourning. For example, in one panel, she writhes on the ground, and cheekily answers her teacher’s question, “What are you doing?” with,

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“I’m suffering, can’t you see?” (PI 97). Within this brief sequence, then, the narrative moves from depicting the conventions of mourning to its ridicule. The comedic element is frequently produced through the divergent messages delivered by the written text on one hand and the image on the other. This dual codification is a significant feature of comics because it allows each register to retain its integrity while it is read against the other. Humour also positions Marji as a sympathetic ‘outsider’ when much of its comedic impulse undermines the status quo. Writing on the link between post-dictatorial Latin American, trauma, and the use of humour in cultural representation, Jordana Blejmar suggests that ‘playful’ forms of memory are invoked by contemporary artists who “often use humor, popular genres, children’s games and visual techniques” to “toy with trauma” (2016, 2). Similarly, when the class must decorate their classroom for the anniversary of the Revolution, the girls use toilet paper as garlands and remain united in their contravention by concealing the instigator of the prank, as the caption states, “[e]very situation offered an opportunity for laughter” (PI 92). Again, the element of farce enacts a play of (and on) mourning, for which the teacher reprimands the class. Within the precarity of their circumstances, the girls find resistance and persistence through their acts of parody. Much like the complexities of mourning itself, these acts of ridicule reside outside social conventions as they caricature ‘serious’ performances deployed to enforce the legitimacy of the regime through their repetition. The parodic mode, then, speaks to a strategy of making difficult things “bearable” and allowing the girls to subsume their deeper grief beneath its ritualised performance. At the same time, the cathartic impact of these humorous scenes does not shore up the painful memories that are being recalled but allows them to be explored through the intermittent relief that the child’s play offers. Moreover, the expression of humour creates a sense of community, not only within the setting of the text, but also between readers and the text. Satrapi has commented on the power of humour to connect otherwise disparately situated readers, recalling for example, one reader telling her “I’m not scared any more of the axis of evil. I never imagined that people coming from your country had a sense of humour” (Walter 2004). This recalls Gil Hochberg’s suggestion for a rearticulation of humour as playing a central role as “an effective political instrument and means of building community”, rather than “simply as a release” (2009, 7). Throughout Persepolis, the notion of reading as education is reinforced several times, as Marji/Marjane goes through different developmental phases. Her insistence on “educating oneself” usually arises as a strategy of making sense of confusing or overwhelming circumstances, frequently attached to some form of loss, and this confusion frequently introduces a comedic element. The first example takes place in a narratorial aside where Marji informs the reader that during the lead-up to the Revolution, her parents bought many books to “enlighten” her on politics, including works on the Children of Palestine, Fidel Castro, Vietnam, Iranian revolutionaries, and her favourite, a comic book entitled “Dialectic Materialism” (PI 12). The second instance where Marji

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acknowledges her desire to educate herself occurs when her father relates a darkly humorous incident, which in fact depicts an interstice between private and public mourning. He explains that amongst a public procession carrying the body of a young man killed by the army, a second corpse is sighted as it is relocated from a hospital. The mourner accompanying the body is a widow, who explains her husband is not a “martyr” but has in fact died from cancer. The members of the procession insist that nonetheless, he is a “hero”, and the story ends with the widow joining the demonstration as she chants a revolutionary slogan, “The King is a killer!” (PI 32). While her parents dissolve into laughter, Marji is confused about the locus of the humour. As she thinks to herself, “[c]adaver, cancer, death, murderer”, and then in a separate thought bubble, “Laughter?” This episode ends with an image of Marji reading on her bed, as the caption explains, “I realized then that I didn’t understand anything. I read all the books I could” (PI 32). Thus Satrapi uses education as one link between the personal and the communal, which also acts as a metafictive device in terms of the reader’s relationship with the text of Persepolis as they learn more about Iran. For Marji’s parents, the humour in this episode resides in the widow’s accidental use of the public procession as a vehicle that carries – through its ritual – the widow’s private grief for the death of her husband. The incident contains elements of farce, which is constellated by attributes that paradoxically, also establish the poignancy of the event. Returning to Benjamin’s observations on the relationship between comedy and mourning, he also explains that in secular dramas, “only comedy accorded the allegorical the rights of citizenship … [and] when comedy moves in seriously, then the results are unexpectedly fatal” (1998, 191). The widower’s act of joining the procession in conjunction with the loss of rights following the Revolution, speak back to Benjamin’s phrase, “rights of citizenship”, and can be read allegorically as an act of wellintentioned, but misplaced faith – a metaphor for the outcomes of the Revolution itself. The episode with the widow conjoins farce and sorrow to produce an instance of absurdist, yet poignant humour. To secure their daughter’s survival outside this fraught setting, Marji’s parents eventually send her abroad to Vienna, as portrayed in the denouement to the first volume of Persepolis. Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return, opens with Marjane – the author’s adolescent avatar – describing her arrival in Vienna as a 14-year-old in 1984. Marjane has come to Austria with the “idea of leaving a religious Iran for an open and secular Europe” (PII 1). During her time in Vienna, the aspirations bound up in this move are challenged as Marjane faces heartbreak, racism, and physical and psychic homelessness. On one occasion, she pretends that she is French, rather than Iranian, with a caption explaining that, “being Iranian was a heavy burden to bear at the time” (195). After a period of homelessness and surviving severe bronchitis Marjane decides to return to Iran. Marjane’s rejection of her Iranian identity is inverted after her return to Tehran, where her experiences overseas now alienate her from her friends. Feeling increasingly isolated, and after turning to a number of mental

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health professionals, Marjane attempts suicide twice. Her improbable survival (her therapist exclaims, “[i]t must be a miracle!”) initiates a shift in Marjane’s sense of self; she decides that she “was not made to die” (PII 119) and trains as an aerobics instructor before completing a course at the College of Art in Tehran. As the second volume of Persepolis draws to a close, Marjane permanently leaves Iran for France in 1994, having been accepted into the School of Decorative Arts in Strasbourg.

Bearing witness Throughout the text, Marjane and other characters repeatedly emphasise the importance of remembering lives lost, both in the text’s present and in retrospect. In one of Marji’s final conversations with her Uncle Anoosh, he explains his political activism, exile, and imprisonment to her, before emphasising “Our family memory must not be lost. Even if it’s not easy for you, even if you don’t understand it all”, to which she replies, “Don’t worry, I’ll never forget” (PI 60). The political import of the text is heightened, not only through the story, but also because of the self-conscious futurity of the narrative as acts of remembrance ricochet between past, present, and future audiences of the story. The reader repeatedly encounters representations of individuals who have perished under horrific circumstances and who are memorialised within the pages of Satrapi’s work. Marjane’s Uncle Anoosh, her neighbour, Neda, and family friends Siamak Jari and Mohsen Shakiba, are immortalised through the narrative that remains intact beyond each of their respective lifespans. The commemoration of each life stands in for the broader recognition in Satrapi’s preface to the memory of millions of individuals who have perished in Iran’s recent history and whom Satrapi insists must not be forgotten, an injunction repeatedly invoked throughout Persepolis. The form of secondary witnessing in Persepolis plays a distinctive role within the narrative in conveying the complex affective arrangements that accompany intergenerational loss, one that, I argue, is characterised by a form of textual haunting. For example, after the introduction of the veil in 1980, Marji’s education undergoes an enormous upheaval, as her school transforms from coeducational, French speaking and non-denominational to a religiously didactic, single sex, mono-linguistic institution. In a panel depicting boys and girls walking into separate doorways against a solid black background, the caption explains, “we found ourselves veiled and separated from our friends” (PI 4). The final panel on this page consists of Marji, wearing hijab, as she faces the reader with a grim expression and open arms, stating, “and that, was that” (PI 4). The shock of the new, oppressive circumstances is partially absorbed within the aside, which signals the radical nature of the changes following the Revolution. By displacing the narratorial voice from the caption to the diegetic character of Marji, the distinction between past (image) and present (text) collapses, so that a ghost from the past – in the figure of Marji – speaks directly to the

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reader in the present. This textual haunting complicates the statement, “that, was that”, because the past is clearly not confined to the past, but has rather broken through its temporal confinement to reach towards the present. A division appears at the site of what was perceived to be a unified site. Satrapi tracks this oscillation through an economic use of black and white. For example, she depicts different protests – one in Tehran against the Shah, and the other in Vienna against the rise of the fascism in the Waldheim Government – by using essentially the same image, only cast in reverse of the other. The first example (PI 18) is used in conjunction with her parents’ participation in demonstrations preceding the 1979 Revolution, and in the second (PII 74), the reader can pick out Marjane’s dark hair among the Austrians. By mapping the visual identities of these disparate groups across almost interchangeable images, Satrapi troubles assumptions about how difference is read visually. The expressions on the demonstrator’s faces in both scenes are identical, creating a visual equivalence between the protests in Tehran and Vienna. The Viennese rally recalls Marjane’s parents demonstrating before the Revolution in Tehran, and imprints the Viennese scene with the trace of this earlier protest. This scene of melancholic remembrance is differentiated by Marjane’s insertion in the Austrian protest, and by doing so, Satrapi literally draws a connection between her and her parents in an inter-generational transmission of protest. The images also acquire a particular pathos by their identical positioning at the top of each respective left-hand page. Their replication also suggests that oppression will be rejected by those who are moved to value humanity, regardless of whether the persecution is in the name of Islamic fundamentalism, neo-Nazism, or another ideology. Cathy Caruth offers a useful definition of testimony, one that resonates with the primacy of memory in Persepolis: “To testify—to vow to tell, to promise and produce one’s own speech as material evidence for truth—is to accomplish a speech act, rather than to simply formulate a statement” (emphasis in original, Explorations in Memory 1995, 17). Satrapi alternately occupies the position of a primary and secondary witness (respectively observing events first hand, and remediating the past through imagined memories), and the production of Persepolis is a testament to Satrapi’s own traumatic survival. As Caruth suggests, traumatic survival can be understood in relation to the “temporality of the missed event”, signposted by a complicated engagement with the past, often in the form of a “responsibility or a command” (“Introduction” 1995, 3). As the protagonist of her story, Marjane internalises a distinct sense of responsibility toward the past and its often expulsed contents, and this imperative permeates the text. This promise is repeatedly relayed in the text itself, by different characters and by Marjane herself. As she prepares to leave Iran as a 14-year-old her father exclaims, “Don’t ever forget who you are!” This time, Marji breaks the fourth wall and replies, “No. I won’t ever forget” (PI 148). The solemnity of Marji’s expression is enhanced by the white reflective light that enshrines her image as though she were an icon.7 Her gaze meets the reader’s as a reminder that both she and the reader are literary witnesses to the events that have been

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depicted in the preceding pages. The meeting of Marji’s gaze with that of the reader produces an oscillation between the two positions, as the reader encounters Marji, who is watching the reader observe her. The narrative moment bears precisely on both movements; Marji speaks to the reader on behalf of Iranians from her generation and that of her parents, and in doing so she breaks the implied world of the text and irrupts its temporal setting. The reader is thus called into a direct relation to the text, through Marji’s ‘outward’ gaze. Writing on shame and the function of the secondary witness, Dorata Glowacka argues that, It is also in the caesura between the possibility and impossibility of speech that a peculiar feeling, experienced by the secondary witness […] is located. It is an affective mixture of grief, awe, and respect but certainly also shame—the shame for the other’s shame, the shame for my own comfort. (2006, 11) Implicit in Marjane’s narrativisation of her role as a secondary witness is the representation of her shame, particularly noticeable in the second volume of Persepolis. In turn, the reader adopts two forms of witnessing in relation to Marjane’s mode of witnessing, identified by Dori Laub as being a witness to the testimonial of others (in this case Marjane) and by being “a witness to the [reader’s] process of witnessing itself” (“An Event Without A Witness” 1992, 75). Glowacka’s attention to the “affective mixture” that might circulate within the complicated mode of secondary witnessing attaches itself to Marjane and, I would suggest, equally to the reader. Herein lies the intensity of the text; by drawing the reader in to the diegetic events, the reader’s responsibility as a witness of the text is critically produced at intervals as Marji/ Marjane disrupts his or her ‘invisibility’ by breaking the fourth wall. Satrapi uses this technique sparingly throughout Persepolis, and the material lines of the artist’s hand are used to establish and disrupt the gaze. In the example discussed here, the encounter between Marji and the reader brings the episode to a close, and its position in the bottom right-hand corner of the page reinforces this act of partial closure. Notably, the imperative to bear witness does not – or perhaps cannot – always demand a faithful interpretation of temporality. As Satrapi described in an interview, beyond the desire of storytelling, “there’s something extra when you position yourself as a witness: you also have to re-orient your mind” (Hill quoted in Chute Graphic Women 2010, 166). I suggest that this becomes particularly relevant in traumatic circumstances where survival announces itself as a conditional circumstance. In an episode entitled “The Bracelet”, the reader learns about the death of Neda Baba-Levy, Marji’s Jewish friend and neighbour, who is killed by a bomb blast (PI 142). While her mother uncomfortably suggests that the Baba-Levy’s might have left home on the Sabbath, Marji realises the devastating truth when she sees Neda’s hand partially exposed under the building rubble. In particular, she

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recognises the bracelet the wrist bears and is therefore able to identify the body part, horrifyingly, as belonging to Neda. The episode ends with her explanation, “[n]o scream in the world could have relieved my suffering and my anger”, adorning a solid black panel (PI 142).8 This panel sequence presents the reader with what Marji would perhaps see with her eyes covered. In Persepolis, this event takes place when Marji is 12 years old. However, Satrapi has explained that this event actually took place when she was 18, after her return from Austria to Iran. She explains, “[t]he feeling of seeing a bomb falling [at any time] is the same […] [w]ho cares if it happened at this time or another time?” (Roberts 2015). Satrapi’s statement describes the way that traumatic memories reveal themselves in the way that they breach normative temporal frameworks, emerging unbidden through the somatic memory of the body. The devastating impact of “seeing a bomb falling” remains the same, regardless of whether this event is witnessed at the age of 12 or 18. Indeed, one can suggest that the chronological inaccuracy of the event serves to emphasise the way in which narrative frameworks can “hold” traumas that might otherwise be dismissed because of their factual inaccuracies.9 In turn, the discontinuous narration attests to the difficulties of survival because it seeks to make sense of an extraordinary event that cannot be understood within ordinary, chronological, historical narratives. The double trauma of living through war and revolution, and witnessing this carnage thus rearranges the linear placement of the event. In this respect, the title of each episode in Persepolis, such as “The Bracelet”, finds meaning belatedly once the reader has located its crux. This feature brings to mind the episodic titles in Benjamin’s One-Way Street [1928], in which he weaves together impressions of the ‘present’ – street signs, conversations, and city-scapes, recorded in prose pieces with titles such as “Breakfast Room”, “Mexican Embassy”, and “Number 13”. Though these narrative shards describe these and other scenes, they also incorporate a sense of aesthetic experimentation that would come to characterise various modernisms, including descriptions of noise and other forms of stimulus. As Susan Sontag suggests about the structure of One-Way Street, “[m]emory, the staging of the past, turns the flow of events into tableaux. Benjamin is not trying to recover his past, but to understand it: to condense it into its spatial forms, its premonitory structures” (1979, 13). The organisation of space remains critical to how comics such as Persepolis stage memories visually, allowing their creators to experiment with its contours through the use of white-space, particularly noticeable in The Four Immigrants Manga (Chapter 1), and Persepolis, but also in “A Guard’s Story” (Chapter 6) and ligne claire (clear line) aesthetic of The Photographer (Chapter 5). The felt spaces of memory, including its “premonitory structures” to use Sontag’s term, is evident in all of the texts, and particularly in the bodily archives that feature in Epileptic by David B. and Stitches by David Small, the subjects of the next chapter. Satrapi’s text, then, opens a window onto those lives lost or disavowed in official historical records, both in Iran and in the West. Figured as a work of witnessing, the text commemorates individuals who have perished and whose

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lives stand in, symbolically, for the thousands who were victims of war and revolution. Like photography, the hand-drawn narrative records an indexical mark in the midst of death – and here, the mark is linked directly to the hand of its creator, rather than the surface of the photographic plate or digital screen. This physical tracing bears the imprint of survival, the “I am here” of articulation expressed through the material line of the text. In this way, the text expands the visual archive by depicting events that have been rarely captured through other visual media such as photography or film. Satrapi’s panels also reference one another through visual equivalence. Soon after the Revolution, Marji learns that the regime has closed universities nationally for what will turn out to be 2 years. Explaining that she wanted to study chemistry like Marie Curie, Satrapi includes a panel with Marie Curie lying in bed, looking at a test tube, as she states, “It’s I who discovered the newest radioactive element” (PI 73).10 The caption of the following panel states, “And so another dream went up in smoke”. The image here depicts Marji, also lying down, and from the same perspective as Curie. The pillows on which both women lay their heads have the same design, with similar crease marks. They resemble one another with their dark hair parted in the same way, their forlorn expressions gazing upwards in despairing contemplation. Satrapi compresses time as she frames the two women side-by-side, lamenting for the circumstances under which they labour, hindered by the treatment of their gender. Their visual equivalence unites their anguish as women. In the Curie panel, Satrapi’s narrative reflects, “I wanted to be an educated liberated woman, and if the pursuit of knowledge meant getting cancer, so be it” (73). The significance of education is emphasised in a comparative manner, so that Marji’s personal history, and privations under the new regime, is understood within a broader chronicling of women’s struggles for educational opportunities and recognition – such as Curie’s struggle for acknowledgement of her ground-breaking work in chemistry by the Nobel committee.11 After Marjane returns to Tehran in Persepolis 2, her father explains some of the wartime events that have taken place since her departure. She exclaims, “I’m all ears” (PII 99) as he starts talking about events leading up to the ceasefire between Iran and Iraq, and specifically, events that confronted the Mujahedeen (a political-militant organisation) in their failed attempt to support armed opposition to the Iranian Government. In the face of the monumental losses the country has suffered, with victims of the war numbering around 1 million, as her father explains (PII 103), her struggles appear insignificant. As Marianne Hirsch notes, in In the Shadow of No Towers – another text about traumatic memory – Spiegelman explains that after the destruction of the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, he is haunted not only by what he “actually” saw, but also “by the images he didn’t witness” (“Collateral Damage” 2004, 1213). Spiegelman’s comments are relevant to Persepolis precisely because Marjane is consumed by imagining things that she has not witnessed, alongside those that she has. This form of second sight correlates with Cathy Caruth’s argument that the belated act of “repetitive seeing” tries to make sense at the fundamental incomprehensibility of a traumatic event (Unclaimed Experience 1996, 92). Indeed, the frames

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of Persepolis convey Satrapi’s second sight by re-presenting the events of her childhood in a belated act of narrativisation. Elsewhere, writing on the circulation of particular photographs from the Holocaust from an otherwise immense archive of Holocaust photography – most of which are rarely seen, Marianne Hirsch argues that for the second generation of Holocaust survivors, the “compulsive and traumatic repetition” of images may connect them to the first generation; whereby they produce rather than screen the effect of trauma (“Surviving Images” 2001, 8). Hirsch suggests that for this generation who engage in postmemory, “memory consists not of events, but of representation” (8), which brings to mind Benjamins’s statement that history decomposes into images rather than narrative. The elements of postmemory are immediately apparent upon Marjane’s return in the way that she imagines memories, as representation, based on the narratives of the witnesses around her. It is this gap that Marjane attempts to bridge in the form of ‘screen memories’ as she imagines the events her father describes. Overwhelmed by the affective landscape in Tehran, Marjane’s attempts to communicate with her family and friends about her experiences in Vienna are not always successful. At the end of her father’s explanation of the trials that have befallen large sections of the Iranian population, Marjane decides, “I would never tell them anything about my Austrian life. They had suffered enough as it was” (PII 103). Moreover, even when she is asked questions by old friends about her “Austrian life”, they are often more interested in confirming their ideas of what it means to have lived in the West, rather than hear her story for what it bears. Consequently, she must also shoulder their disappointment when she presents a conflicting account of her life in Austria. This conflict is revealed through a particular conversation; her friends ask whether, having lived abroad, she enjoys having sex, and Marjane replies, “it depends who it’s with”, implicitly revealing that she has had more than one sexual partner. Her friends are outraged at this response, which challenges their perception of appropriate sexual behaviour. They ask Marjane accusingly, “what’s the difference between you and a whore?” (PII 116), and this experience leaves her “even more depressed” (PII 117). Her growing depression is implied across four panels by a black background that increasingly descends around her crumpling stature (PII 114). On her mother’s advice, she turns to a succession of therapists and doctors, and Satrapi depicts three of these appointments in three consecutive frames. In each scene, Marjane offers different explanations for her depression but does not secure meaningful responses from her listeners. For example, in the second frame, she explains, “[w]hen I was in Vienna […] I was reduced to nothing. I thought that in coming back to Iran, this would change”, to which the therapist responds with only an ellipsis, “…” (PII 117). In an essay on childhood trauma in the context of the Holocaust, Susan Suleiman refers to an ellipsis that separates parts 1 and 2 of French writer George Perec’s W or the Memory of Childhood [1975]. She asks, “[i]s the ellipsis a form of saying, or of not saying? It is both, a sign that says ‘I will not say’ – and that has inspired commentators to say a great deal” (2010, 97). Satrapi uses ellipses in

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Persepolis to denote confusion or being at a loss for words. The feature of the ellipsis is its intimate interface with loss; its sign overwhelmed by the impossibility of denotative significations of loss, and hence can only formulate a moment of absence, or waiting, but which in either case does not promise identifiable meaning. The co-constitutive relationship between the extra-diegetic captions and the speech balloons means that many graphic narratives are polyphonic in structure, creating space for past and present to jostle alongside one another on the same page, and often in the same panel. This oscillation is complicated further by the images that accompany the written word, and the slippages in-between, which generate multiple layers of meaning. In Persepolis, the elision of speech, particularly of women’s voices, is agonisingly represented in its replacement – three successive period points, but is also balanced by literally outspoken episodes, such as when Marjane shouts at the morality police to “stop looking at my ass!” among other examples. Ellipses are used when Satrapi recalls her mother’s distress after being verbally abused for not wearing the veil in the first volume (PI 74) as well as Marjane’s own struggles with depression on her return to Iran. The last in a succession of doctors Marjane consults prescribes medication, which merely numbs her pain, as she vacillates between numbness and a trance-like consciousness (PII 118). In an earlier four-frame sequence, Marjane imagines how family and friends might tend to her. In this sequence, she explains that she has also suffered, and envisions them compassionately showering her with treats as tokens of their understanding for her plight in Vienna (PII 113).12 This sequence constitutes one of the rare occasions in the work where the written and visual messages directly reinforce one another. This correlation between text and image conveys the force of Marjane’s desire to be heard in the face of her struggles. In Survival in Auschwitz, Primo Levi recalls a recurrent nightmare, wherein he describes fragments from his time in Auschwitz, such as the “whistle of three notes, the hard bed” and “bleeding” from the nose, only to have his listeners, who include his sister, turn away (1996, 60). Dori Laub uses this extract to suggest “if one talks about the trauma without being truly heard […] the telling might itself be lived as a return of the trauma—a re-experiencing of the event itself” (italics in original, “Bearing Witness” 1992, 67–8). Marjane also imagines describing narrative slivers to an attentive audience, such as “I was alone” and “I spit up blood” (PII 113), but does not express these experiences to anyone around her. This sequence constitutes a rare occasion in Persepolis where the written and visual messages directly reinforce one another with no irony. This sequence allows the reader access to Marjane’s fantasy, which provides an important rendering of Marjane’s desire to be understood. Although the experiences of each writer are disparate, the painful similarity between their respective accounts is that despite yearning to be heard, their stories remain within the confines of dreams and nightmares.

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Marjane again turns to the unorthodoxy of humour to make her intense psychic disorientation more bearable. As Satrapi states, “[w]hen misery becomes unbearable, you must laugh about it or you die” (2012). This sentiment is evident in Persepolis 2, when Marjane visits an old childhood friend, Kia, who has lost an arm and a leg after serving in the war. They have not seen each other for a long time, and their encounter is initially awkward until Kia tells Marjane a joke, about a man whose body has to be reassembled after “he’s blown into a thousand pieces” (109) in the war. His body is reassembled, and he survives, though not without some changes; the joke’s punch line consists of the man exclaiming “kiss my ass!” while pointing to his underarm. The comedy that emerges from this traumatic reassemblage brings the friends closer together, and bridges the gap in their lived experience. As Marjane drives home smiling post-visit, the caption states, “[t]hat day, I learned something essential: we can only feel sorry for ourselves when our misfortunes are still supportable … once this limit is crossed, the only way to bear the unbearable is to laugh at it” (112). Remembrance is also encoded through olfactory memories; for example, Marji’s grandmother stays with her the night before she leaves Iran. As they lie together, Marji remembers that her grandmother would always place jasmine flowers in her bra. Her memory takes the form of a thin white silhouette with the background and her grandmother’s body blocked out in black, as though even the memory itself is hard to retrieve. In the frame that ends their chat on this night, the reader encounters a close-up of Marji, tearful, as she hugs her grandmother. Here, the narrative shifts from past to present tense; “I smelled my grandmother’s bosom. It smelled good. I’ll never forget that smell” (PI 150). Again, the vow to “never forget” penetrates the present of the narrative voice. The significance of smell as a trace of loss is also found soon after Marjane arrives in Vienna in November 1984. On her first trip to the supermarket, Marjane is overwhelmed by the number of supplies the local supermarket carries, and the caption states, “[i]t had been four years since I’d seen such a well-stocked store” (PII 6). The importance of this supermarket trip remains relevant to the present. After noting that her first purchase on that trip was for scented detergents – no longer available in war-rationed Iran – the narrative continues, “[e]ven today, after all this time, you can always find at least a dozen boxes of good-smelling laundry powder in my house” (PII 6). Thus, the reader encounters an alternative mechanism of ephemeral yet abiding commemoration through olfactory somatic traces of the past. The multiple losses of family, friends, and an old way of life haunt Marjane, and the first volume of Persepolis is studded with these multiple traumas. In the episode entitled “The Heroes”, the reader learns that 3,000 political prisoners were released following the Shah’s deposition (PI 47). Below a panoramic frame, which shows prisoners being released from imprisonment, the reader is presented with two panels that resemble identity cards for Siamak Jari and Mohsen Shakiba, both of whom are friends of the Satrapi family. The details that accompany each panel catalogue their names, dates of birth, and dates of incarceration and release. The final descriptor notes, “Political Conviction:

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Communist”, and this text stands immediately above their shadows, which stretch deep into the panel’s depth of field against an otherwise white background. As part of the expressionist idiom of Persepolis, these panels provide one example of the way Satrapi uses monochromatic contrast to amplify the dramatic tension of the narrative. Read in the context of the previous episode, in which Marji learns about the kinds of torture that Communist revolutionaries faced under the Shah’s regime, the shadows resemble tombstones, acknowledging the fate of many revolutionaries executed under the Shah’s regime. On another level, the men’s shadows herald the near future in their strong resemblance to the chador (full length hijab) that women would don under the Islamic Regime. Thus the celebrations following the Shah’s exile, represented in a full-page panel with a cheering population (PI 42), turn out to be premature, as the new regime increasingly curtails the fundamental rights and freedoms of its citizens. The shadows in the “identity card” panels also foreground the fates of both men, as Mohsen is soon found murdered in his home (65) and Siamak’s sister is “executed in his place” as he and his family cross the border “hidden among a flock of sheep” (66). Marjane’s successive displacements from Tehran to Vienna, and back to Tehran, means that she experiences significant shifts in the production of her political and psychic subjectivities. While she is conscious of some of the difficulties she has encountered in her journey regarding her cultural subjectivities, her intellectual awareness does not tend to the traumatic pain she holds. Events from her childhood, including the execution of her beloved uncle Anoosh, and the death of her neighbourhood friend Neda, remain buried, as it were, beneath the narrative of her return, and are not referred to again. Herein lies the transformative potential of intergenerational trauma in that the sufferer cannot be fully aware of all the traumatic elements, some of which may become apparent only after the event or events in question. Her return to Iran thus precipitates a double loss as Marjane confronts a fundamental disconnect that now separates her – at least partially – from the place of her childhood. The signification of ‘home’ upon her return thus bears a double relation to the changes that Marjane carries within herself. Her intense disorientation upon her return illustrates the vexed question of what it means to have departed from, and then return to Iran. Indeed, it becomes increasingly apparent that she cannot rely on old associations upon which to map her sense of ‘home’. For example, as she ventures into the streets for the first time, she confronts the brutalised streetscape and notes enormous images such as the “sixty-five-foot-high murals presenting martyrs” (PII 96) that crowd in above her head. She also winds her way through street signs that have been renamed to memorialise the martyrs of the war, a palimpsestic space that is now marked by the trauma of the Iran–Iraq war. Satrapi depicts her confusion by drawing five versions of Marjane’s face looking in different direction within a single frame. Her disorientation also reveals itself, and is produced by, psychic unrest; for example, as she walks through the streets of her former neighbourhood she has the feeling she is

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“walking through a cemetery […] surrounded by the victims of a war I had fled” (PII 97).13 In one frame, Satrapi places the ground line only one-third of the way down the length of the frame, and the cavernous space below is filled with skulls protruding from window frames in an uneven assortment. This figuration suggests that the ghosts of her past are breaking beyond the frame of her unconscious, repressions of her memories of revolution and war. Indeed, in the next frame, skeletal figures cling to Marjane as she hurries home, their gaunt frames pressing against her. In this funereal streetscape, Marjane’s trauma reveals itself belatedly, in the presence of the ghosts whom she has previously banished from her imagination, including those of her uncle Anoosh and Neda, but whose beings she recuperates within the pages of her comic.

Conclusion Memory finds itself expressed and contained through a multiplicity of forms – forms that are, I suggest, irreducible and creative, embedded as they are in historical, political, and cultural specificities. The intersections between visual and verbal content instantiate multiple meanings that mimic everyday slippages between appearances and reality in relation to material and discursive registers. Satrapi’s Persepolis demonstrates the ways in which comics and graphic novels powerfully attest to and imagine strategies for survival and resilience in women’s life writing. The author’s autobiographical text is cast in black and white – which immediately sets the scene for the memories that form the focus of each episode. In turn, the episodes demonstrate the wide range of affective strategies that are essential for survival; such as grief, anger, and humour. What we see within the pages of Persepolis is not that storytelling is curtailed by the demands of survival but rather that storytelling signifies survival. The imperative to remember the past is nestled within each episode, as Satrapi narrates the words used by family and friends to animate their memories, and her memories of the past, for the reader. In this process, it is an affective fidelity to the past that is privileged rather than a temporal one. This is not to suggest that Satrapi simply presents an ad hoc narrative, far from it, but rather that her narrative provides a counter-historical account of Iran post-1979 through its autobiographical focus and emphasis on lived experience. At the conclusion of Persepolis II, Marjane explains that, not “having been able to build anything in my own country”, she travels to France in 1994 to take an entry test to enter the School of Decorative Arts in Strasbourg. Following her acceptance, she finally leaves Iran for good on 9 September 1994. The caption explains that her parents and grandmother accompanied her to the airport, and that she saw her grandmother only once in the following year. The story concludes; “She died January 4, 1996…freedom had a price…” (ellipses in original, 187). The backdrop at the scene of her departure is an almost exact replica of the background to her first parting. By repeating this image, the second scene of departure invokes the pain of the first separation. Satrapi thus invests the

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movement of departure with the knowledge that while the circumstances of each differ, they are fundamentally the same – because for Marjane, it means losing her family and homeland again. Persepolis ends with an ellipsis, a polysemous mark, which contains promise as well as uncertainty. Writing on Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Andreas Huyssen observes that “[r]ather than providing us with an enlightened moral or with a happy reconciliation between … trauma and memory, the aesthetic and emotional effect of Maus remains jarring throughout” (2003, 125). The same argument is apt for the concluding scene of Persepolis; the ellipsis leaves the reader with space to ruminate on Marjane’s life and the multiple forfeitures that shape her memories of the past. Hillary Chute suggests that “[i]mages in comics appear in fragments, just as they do in actual recollection; this fragmentation, in particular, is a prominent feature of traumatic memory” (Graphic Women 2010, 4). Indeed, the co-constitutive relationship between the extra-diegetic ‘authorial’ narrative – often in the form of captions – and diegetic text – usually in the form of speech balloons – means that most graphic narratives are polyphonic in structure, creating space for past and present to jostle alongside one another on the same page, and frequently in the same panel. This oscillation is complicated further by the images that accompany the written word, and the slippages in-between, which instantiate multiple layers of meaning. In the years since Persepolis was first published, Satrapi and French comics artist Vincent Paronnaud directed a film version of the book in 2007, which received wide critical and popular acclaim. In 2009, two Iranian émigrés living in Shanghai used images from Persepolis, with Satrapi’s permission, to produce Persepolis 2.0: Iran’s Post-Election Uprising: Hopes and Fears Revealed. 14 Like the original text, Persepolis 2.0 was aimed at raising reader consciousness, providing an overview of the widespread protests that followed the announcement of the falsified election result. The morning after the elections on 12 June 2009, former President Ahmadinejad was declared the winner with reportedly 62 per cent of the national vote, despite the fact that there were 40 million votes that still needed to be counted. The editors of this strip – known only by pseudonyms Payman and Sina – also included some of their own illustrations to construct the narrative, and explained that they used the images from Persepolis because of its popularity in the West. Persepolis 2.0 depicted events that were heavily censored in Iran, not only in relation to the election outcomes, but also through its closing reference to the death of Neda Agha-Soltan, a 26-year old woman who was shot by a member of the Basij militia in Tehran on 20 June 2009 as she watched demonstrations against the election result. Her death was filmed and quickly broadcast via social media networks, which enabled a particular video still of her bloodied face to be heralded in popular media as a symbol of the plight of the Iranian ‘Green Movement’ (Black 2010; Ravits 2009; Fathi 2009). Protesters worldwide used her image to demonstrate their support for free and fair elections in Iran across London, Washington DC, Stockholm, Berlin, Istanbul, The Hague, and Islamabad, among other locations. Neda’s death draws attention to the dangers that witnessing can itself engender, where even

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the possibility of looking may present a risk to life. Against an oppressive political regime, both Persepolis and Persepolis 2.0 embed traumatic histories within an alternate visual archive. Much like its urtext, Persepolis 2.0 portrays contraband images and ideas through the visual economy of the text, generating another form of archival remembrance by re-using Satrapi’s images. It also speaks of the continuing, and critical, relevance of visual texts and visuality more generally, particularly where the permission to ‘look’ and record is circumscribe if not prohibited outright. The next chapter turns to memories of illness and the lived experiences of bodily trauma in Epileptic (2005) by David B. and Stitches: A Memoir (2009) by David Small, paying particular attention to representations of gesture and other forms of physical signification. The discussion configures the body as a living archive, and one that bears the marks of its history in visible and invisible ways.

Notes 1 For the sake of referencing convenience, I refer to the first volume of Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood as PI, and the second volume, Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return as PII. I use the name ‘Marji’ to refer to Satrapi’s authorial avatar in Volume I of Persepolis and ‘Marjane’ to refer to her avatar in Volume II. 2 There have been a number of works of Iranian women’s life-writing that have become successful in an Anglo-American context, including Reading Lolita in Tehran (2008) by Azar Nafisi; Tara Bahrampour, To See and See Again: A Life in Iran and America (2000); Azadeh Moaveni, Lipstick Jihad: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America and American in Iran (2006); Firoozeh Dumas, Funny in Farsi: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America (2004); and Gelareh Assavesh, Saffron Sky: A Life Between Iran and America (2000), as well as Nobel Laureate Shirin Ebadi’s memoir, Iran Awakening: One Woman’s Journey to Reclaim Her Life and Country (2007). 3 This image can be viewed online via Scribd, https://www.scribd.com/document/ 231951041/Persepolis-2-The-Story-of-a-Return, at the corresponding page number. 4 This image can be viewed online via Scribd, https://www.scribd.com/doc/9635904/ Satrapi-Persepolis-1-English, at the corresponding page number. 5 This image can be viewed online via Scribd, https://www.scribd.com/doc/9635904/ Satrapi-Persepolis-1-English, at the corresponding page number. 6 For further discussion on the tradition of tessellation and geometric design in Islamic art, see for example, Jules Bourgoin, Arabic Geometrical Pattern and Design. New York: Dover, 1974; Sheila S. Blair, and Jonathan M. Bloom, The Art and Architecture of Islam, 1250–1800. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994; and David Wade, Pattern in Islamic Art. New York: The Overlook Press, 1976. 7 This image can be viewed online via Scribd, https://www.scribd.com/doc/9635904/ Satrapi-Persepolis-1-English, at the corresponding page number. 8 This image can be viewed online via Scribd, https://www.scribd.com/doc/9635904/ Satrapi-Persepolis-1-English, at the corresponding page number. 9 My reading of this scene is indebted to Dori Laub’s landmark essay on “Bearing Witness or, The Vicissitudes of Witnessing,” in which he recounts a female patient’s description of an explosion in Auschwitz. While I am not seeking to compare the trauma perpetuated by the Holocaust with the trauma that Satrapi describes in her narrative, Laub’s sensitive reading of his patient’s erroneous

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recollection about the details of the explosion is a useful analogue for the current discussion. Rather than discounting the patient’s memory as incorrect, and therefore invalid, Laub suggests that the woman was testifying to something more radical within the confines of Auschwitz than the explosion itself. He suggests that her testimony concerned “the reality of an unimaginable occurrence,” or in other words, “[s]he was testifying not simply to empirical historical facts, but to the very secret of survival and of resistance to extermination” (1992, 61). This image can be viewed online via Scribd, https://www.scribd.com/doc/9635904/ Satrapi-Persepolis-1-English, at the corresponding page number. At the time of writing, Satrapi is producing Radioactive, a biopic of Marie Curie. This image can be viewed online via Scribd, https://www.scribd.com/document/ 231951041/Persepolis-2-The-Story-of-a-Return, at the corresponding page number. This image can be viewed online via Scribd, https://www.scribd.com/document/ 231951041/Persepolis-2-The-Story-of-a-Return, at the corresponding page number. To read Persepolis 2.0, please visit the following site: https://www.flickr.com/photos/ 30950471@N03/sets/72157620466531333/

Bibliography Benjamin, Walter. One-Way Street and Other Writings. Trans. J.A. Underwood. London: Penguin Classics, 2009 [1928]. Print. Benjamin, Walter. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Trans. John Osborne. London and New York: Verso, 1998. Print. B.[eauchard], David. Epileptic. Trans. Kim Thompson. New York: Pantheon Books, 2005. Print. Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home: A Family Tragi-Comic. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. Print. Black, Ian. “Film About Iranian Protest Victim Neda Agha-Soltan Beats Regime’s Censors”. The Guardian. 4 June 2010. https://www.theguardian.com. Accessed 20 January 2019. Web. Blejmar, Jordana. Playful Memories: The Autofictional Turn in Post-Dictatorial Argentina. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Print. Caruth, Cathy (ed.). “An Introduction to Trauma, Memory, and Testimony”. Reading On 1. 1(2006): 1–3. Print. Caruth, Cathy (ed.). “Introduction” to Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. Print. Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, History, and Narrative. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Print. Chute, Hillary. Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. Print. Cvetkovich, Ann. “Drawing the Archive in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home”. WSQ 36. 1/ 2 (2008): 111–128. Print. Doucet, Julie. My New York Diary. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly Publications, 2011. Print. Fathi, Nazila. “In a Death Seen Around the World, a Symbol of Iranian Protests”. The New York Times. 22 June 2009. https://nytimes.com. Accessed 20 January 2019. Web. Glowacka, Dorata. “‘Like an Echo Without a Source’: Subjectivity as Witnessing and the Holocaust Narrative”. Reading On 1. 1 (2006): 1-14. Accessed 23 June 2018. Web. Hajdu, David. “Persian Miniatures”. BookForum, Oct/Nov (2004): 32–35. Print. Herzog, Rudolph. Dead Funny: Telling Jokes in Hitler’s Germany. Trans. Jefferson Chase. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2011. Print.

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Hirsch, Marianne. “Editor’s Column: Collateral Damage”. PMLA 119. 5(2004): 1209–1215. Print. Hirsch, Marianne. “Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory”. The Yale Journal of Criticism 14. 1(2001): 5–37. Print. Hochberg, Gil. “A Conversation with Gil Hochberg on ‘Queer Politics and the Question of Palestine’”. Interview by Hoda El Shakry. Newsletter of the UCLA Center for the Study of Women (April 2009): 4–7. Print. Holman, Valerie and Debra Kelly. “Introduction. War in the Twentieth Century: The Functioning of Humour in Cultural Representation”. Journal of European Studies 31. 123(2001): 247–263. Print. Huyssen, Andreas. Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. Print. Kiyama, Henry Yoshitaka. The Four Immigrants Manga: A Japanese Experience in San Francisco, 1904–1924. Trans. Frederik L. Schodt. Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge Press, 1999. Print. Kominsky-Crumb, Aline. Need More Love. New York: Spruce, 2007. Print. Laub, Dori. “Bearing Witness or, The Vicissitudes of Witnessing”, in Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History. Eds Shoshanna Felman and Dori Laub. New York: Routledge, 1992: 57–74. Print. Laub, Dori. “An Event Without A Witness: Truth, Testimony and Survival”, in Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History. Eds Shoshanna Felman and Dori Laub. New York: Routledge, 1992: 75–92. Print. Leith, Sam. “A Writer’s Life: Marjane Satrapi”. Telegraph, 12 December 2004. Print. Levi, Primo. Survival in Auschwitz. Trans. Stuart Woolf. New York: Touchstone Books, 1996. Print. Ostby, Marie. “Graphics and Global Dissent: Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, Persian Miniatures, and the Multifaceted Power of Comic Protest”. PMLA 132. 3(2017): 558–579. Print. Payman and Sina (eds). Persepolis 2.0: Iran’s Post-Election Uprising: Hopes and Fears Revealed. https://www.flickr.com/photos/30950471@N03/sets/72157620466531333/. Accessed 4 June 2018. Web. Persepolis. Dir. Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud. Perf. Chiara Mastroianni and Catherine Deneuve. Diaphana Distribution/Sony Pictures Releasing/Optimum Releasing 2007. Web. Pont, Xavier Marco del. “Confronting the Whiteness: Blankness, Loss and Visual Disintegration in Graphic Narratives”. Studies in Comics 3. 2(2012): 253–274. Print. Pozorski, Amiee L. “An Interview with Trauma Pioneer Cathy Caruth”. Connecticut Review 28. 1(2006): 77–84. Print. Ravits, Jessica. “Neda: Latest Iconic Image to Inspire”. CNN World/International. 2009. http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/meast/06/24/neda.iconic.images/. Accessed 23 February 2014. Web. Robbins, Trina (ed). The Complete Wimmen’s Comix. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly Publications, 2016. Print. Roberts, Sheila. “Marjane Satrapi Interview, Persepolis”. MoviesOnline. www.movie sonline.ca/movienews_13781.html. Accessed 1 March 2015. Web. Ryan, Laura T. “Images of her Homeland: Iranian-born Artist, Writer, Speaks in Syracuse”. 4 January 2009. http://blog.syracuse.com. Accessed 16 June 2011. Web. Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood. Trans. Anjali Singh. New York: Pantheon, 2003. Print.

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Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return. Trans. L’Association. New York: Pantheon, 2004. Print. Satrapi, Marjane. “An Evening With Artist, Author, and Filmmaker Marjane Satrapi”. The Ruth and Carl J. Shapiro Celebrity Lectures. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA. 25 April 2012. Web. Sontag, Susan. “Introduction”, in Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street and Other Writings. London: NLB, 1979. Print. Spiegelman, Art. The Complete Maus. London: Penguin Books, 2003. Print. Suleiman, Susan Rubin. “The Edge of Memory: Literary Innovation and Childhood Trauma”, in The Future of Memory. Eds Richard Crownshaw, Jane Kilby and Antony Rowland. New York: Berghahn, 2010: 93–109. Print. Walter, Natasha. “Marjane Satrapi: The Lipstick Rebellion”. Independent. 5 September 2004. independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/marjane-satrapi-the-lipstickrebellion-40666.html. Accessed 21 March 2018. Web. Whitlock, Gillian. Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago, 2007. Print. Yang, Gene Luen. American Born Chinese. New York: First Second, 2006. Print.

Further reading Ahmed, Sara, Claudia Casteneda, Anne-Marie Fortier and Mimi Sheller (eds). Uprootings/Regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration. Oxford: Berg, 2003. Print. Assavesh, Gelareh. Saffron Sky: A Life Between Iran and America. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2000. Print. Bahrampour, Tara. To See and See Again: A Life in Iran and America. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2000. Print. Blair, Sheila S. and Jonathan M. Bloom. The Art and Architecture of Islam, 1250–1800. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994. Print. Bourgoin, Jules. Arabic Geometrical Pattern and Design. New York: Dover, 1974. Print. Chute, Hillary. “The Texture of Retracing in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis”. WSQ 36. 1/2 (2008): 92–110. Print. Dumas, Firoozeh. Funny in Farsi: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America. New York: Random House, 2004. Print. Ebadi, Shirin. Iran Awakening: One Woman’s Journey to Reclaim Her Life and Country. New York: Random House, 2007. Print. Kent, Miriam. “Unveiling Marvels: Ms. Marvel and the Reception of the New Muslim Superheroine”. Feminist Media Studies 15. 3(2015): 522–538. Print. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: Kitchen Sink Press, 1993. Print. McKinney, Mark. Redrawing the French Empire in Comics. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press, 2013. Print. Moaveni, Azadeh. Lipstick Jihad: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America and American in Iran. New York: PublicAffairs, 2006. Print. Nafisi, Azar. Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books. New York: Penguin Random House, 2008. Print. Naghibi, Nima and Andrew O’Malley. “Estranging the Familiar: ‘East’ and ‘West’ in Satrapi’s Persepolis”. ESC: English Studies in Canada 31. 2/3 (2005): 223–247. Print. Satrapi, Marjane. Embroderies. London: Jonathan Cape, 2008. Print.

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Tully, Annie. “An Interview with Marjane Satrapi”. BookSlut. October 2004. http:// www.bookslut.com/features/2004_10_003261.php. Accessed 20 July 2010. Web. Wade, David. Pattern in Islamic Art. New York: The Overlook Press, 1976. Print. Whitlock, Gillian and Anna Poletti. “Self-Regarding Art”. Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 31. 1(2008): v–xxiii. Print.

4

Memories of illness in Epileptic by David B. and Stitches by David Small

Introduction Memory finds itself embedded within the body, and in the physical and psychic marks that bodies bear and remember. This chapter examines two autobiographical configurations of remembered bodily pain. In the two texts the subject of this chapter – Epileptic (2005) and Stitches: A Memoir (2009) – the reader encounters divergent mnemonic visual codes that convey the difficult and potentially traumatic memories associated with illness and disease. These works are only two examples from the field of graphic medicine, an ever-growing body of literature that encompasses titles such as Judith Vanistendael’s When David Lost His Voice (2012) to Ian Williams’ The Bad Doctor (2014), Nicola Streeton’s Billy, Me & You (2011), and Marbles (2012) by Ellen Forney. The term ‘graphic medicine’ was coined by Ian Williams – a medical doctor and comics artist – when he established the eponymous website, graphicmedicine.org, to describe “the role that comics can play in the study and delivery of healthcare”. Graphic medicine thus encompasses a varied and fecund range of mental and physical conditions such as cancer, grief and mourning, mental illness, and fibromyalgia.1 The diverse insights that comics provide on these and other conditions inform the ways in which the latter can be imagined, understood, and theorised. These insights are valuable not only for patients, their families, and carers, but also for the communication that takes place between medical practitioners and patients. As Susan M. Squier and J. Ryan Marks suggest, “[c] omics written from the perspective of patients and family members […] are calling into question the epistemological authority of the medical profession” (2014, 150). Indeed, in both Epileptic and Stitches, readers are exposed to narratives that explicitly question the authority afforded to doctors and biomedical models of practice, and perhaps more importantly, demonstrate the need to support patient autonomy through a network of care that involves their families as well as medical professionals. The recollection of encounters with medical professionals and spaces of treatment play a central role in both texts, which represent, respectively, the impact of these memories in intimate, affective, and non-discursive ways.

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The narration of the stories through words and images allows the creators to utilise not only explicit memories, but also some of the implicit insights generated through the drawn (and non-verbal) marks on the page, alongside the tension they generate through their interaction. As Leigh Gilmore argues, “the visual iconography of pain produces and reflects knowledge about pain” (“Covering Pain” 2015, 114). In their imaginative, visual topographies, comics literally generate new insights into pain. These non-diagnostic responses augment social discourses around the lived experience of pain, disability, and disease, expanding the contours in which these conditions can be imagined and comprehended. Ideally, then, graphic medicine offers not only new perspectives on medical conditions, but can also promote deeper understanding within the medical community and its interface with patients and the broader public. In so doing, such texts help de-stigmatise illnesses and disease as they communicate lived experiences of these conditions across different historical and cultural settings. How then, does the body speak in comics, and how do the latter represent memories of psychic and physical pain in their storylines? Further, what can graphic novels teach readers about pain discourses and the impact of medical conditions on individuals and their families that reach beyond the biomedical model of treatment? As an inherently spatial medium, comics such as Epileptic and Stitches allow their creators to imagine the contours of their respective memories as they are shaped by experiences such as illness, its reception within the individual body, and refraction via familial and social relationships. As Hillary Chute has argued, “one needs a sense of space for memories to come forward and take shape” (“Materializing Memory” 2011, 292), and both texts literalise the shape of memory through the particular arrangement of the panels, their contents, and the relation between these elements and the page. The anthropologist and literary scholar Vincent Crapanzano argues in relation to bodily pain, that very often the “the body configures society—the very society that ‘created’ it—and becomes, circularly, the ground for that configuration” (2004, 71). This circuitry is evident in both Epileptic and Stitches. Epileptic explores the close connections between pain, emotional topographies, and memory, as they shape B.’s autobiographical narrative about growing up with an older brother, Jean-Christophe, who experiences the first of many epileptic attacks from the age of seven.2 B.’s story focusses on Jean-Christophe’s epilepsy, mediating its impact not only on the latter, but also on B. and his family, through surrealistic and tightly structured visual arrangements. On the other hand, David Small’s Stitches describes the author’s own battle with cancer, which arises after his father, a doctor, over-zealously prescribes an extensive course of radiation therapy to treat David’s ongoing problems with his sinus and digestive tract. In both works the respective creators employ particular visual techniques to provide the emotional architecture on which they map their stories linguistically and spatially. These techniques dramatise their respective memoirs as they describe overwhelming and sometimes traumatic events from their youth

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and childhood. Although both texts are monochromatic, Small uses ink washes and an open line style to focalise his story in a painterly mode, whereas B.’s heavily inked and constrained line work is in keeping with a European bande dessinée tradition that invokes woodcut prints, and Chinese landscape paintings such as “Dongtian Mountain Hall” by Dong Yuan (Five Dynasties 907–960), with their dramatic gradations and congested line-work. The construction of ‘felt space’ in each text acquires its particular affective impact through its aesthetic design, and relation with the page. Stitches utilises white space to convey the suffocating terror of Small’s childhood, while Epileptic is equally smothering in the way that the panels are riddled with iconic signification, with backgrounds that are frequently cloaked in black, and which access David’s affinity for the fantastic and dream life. Similar to Persepolis, readers can discern the combination of humour, sadness, and shock that permeates his story. Nina Mickwitz argues that “[f]amily contributes a significant presence and consideration in comics charting the experiences of illness”, and that autobiographies focussing on family contexts are particularly “fertile” for tracing connections between “social and personal” and “historical and psychical” domains (2016, 131). The importance of family relationships as a way of mediating between these areas is visible within each respective story and its paratextual material. For example, both B. and Small share their respective siblings’ reflections on each of their stories. B.’s sister Florence opens and closes Epileptic with a foreword and afterword. In her foreword, she refers to the mountain imagery that B. incorporates into his story to describe the ongoing battle with epilepsy, and explains that in contrast, she imagined JeanChristophe’s epilepsy as a “powerful little kernel, lodged in the contours of his brain” (np). Small’s work allows him and his brother Ted to reconnect following a prolonged estrangement; Small’s publisher sent a proof copy of Stitches to Ted to ward off potential future disputes. Small cites his brother, who having read the book, responded that it was “a snapshot of my youth. It took me right back”, and he and Small now remain in contact (Abbott 2010). While Stitches acts as a “snapshot” of Ted’s youth, Florence’s imagining of epilepsy as a “powerful little kernel” in Jean-Christophe’s brain forms a stark contrast to B.’s mountain scenes – and both responses are equally valuable as they represent alternate responses to the creative visualisation of pain and its remembrance. Thus, the two works act as documents that generate, as well as galvanise, intimate and collective memories within each artist’s family. The reception of illness within the family forms the fundamental structure through which the narratives of both Epileptic and Stitches are woven. Thomas Couser argues that in contrast to discourses of the medical profession, “autobiographical accounts of medical training and personal narratives of illness reveal how medical discourse may alienate doctors from patients and patients from their bodies and bodily experience” (1997, 19). He continues that, “[o]ne need not want to undermine the authority of physicians to be uneasy with many aspects of medical discourse, such as its tendency to infantilise patients, reify

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illness, and medicalise experience” (21). Indeed, the demands of the practice may render these tendencies mostly invisible to doctors, and even to patients themselves, as their bodies and minds are examined, diagnosed, and treated. Against this occlusion, forms of self-expression such as drawing – an intimate and direct form of communication – are vital to re-incorporating the patient’s self into the frame of lived experiences of illness, disease, treatment, and even recovery. The images of remembered family life, and the narrators’ role within their respective families provide a unique interface between private, personal, cultural, psychic, and embodied experiences, and complicate the biomedical model of patient and carer experiences of illness. By doing so, comics texts can embody a consciousness-raising imperative to de-stigmatise illness and disease through imaginative iterations of the positive and negative impacts of respective conditions, thereby enhancing empathic responses to physical and mental forms of illness. B. accesses his family’s ongoing search for a cure by portraying them climbing a bleak terrain which acts as a metaphor for the difficulty of their mission. B. also depicts himself against this backdrop when, experiencing intermittent “explosions” in his head, he is convinced that epilepsy is going to infect the household (170). The recurrence of this mountain imagery speaks of the desperate, relentless search for a cure for Jean-Christophe’s condition. Many artistic and cultural figures have reportedly lived with epilepsy such as Julius Caesar, Van Gogh, and Edgar Allen Poe. Fyodor Dostoevsky kept a record of his epileptic seizures, which varied in their type, and introduced the condition into his writings, perhaps most famously through the character of Prince Myshkin in The Idiot, who experiences its onset as a “great calm”, characterised by brief ecstatic state in which “[h]is heart and mind were flooded by a dazzling light” immediately preceding the onset of the seizure itself (2004, II 5). Dostoevsky’s reference to a “great calm” and the visceral description of Myshkin’s ecstatic aura suggests an oceanic, a-linguistic domain, in which language alone fails to capture the enormity of the experience.3 In Epileptic, as well as other works such as Julie Doucet’s My New York Diary (1999) which indirectly addresses the author’s epilepsy, the representation of the condition as a multi-sensorial experience is conveyed through the co-mixing of words and images. Their simultaneous expression act as cognates to the realm of the corporeal, which occupies the space between verbal and non-linguistic registers, and where the varying lines of signification frequently diverge or contradict one another. Anne Bogart’s argument about the space of theatre and art is apposite to considering the mode of representation in comics, “[o]pposition, or dialectic, sets up alternative systems of perceiving. It creates shock spaces where insight might occur […] these two opposing associations set up an experience, not an answer” (italics in original, quoted in Larkin 2014, 183). This “shock space” is particularly valuable in the exploration and representation of traumatic memories and lived experiences such as an epileptic attack, both of which are characterised through their breakages, lapses, and gaps in recall. The gestural import of the body and its actions offers a rich

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semantic field of non-verbal signification that may at times, intersect with spoken utterances – although this is not always required to produce meaning. Herein lies one of the most important aspects of graphic narratives about illness in all its guises – the space of the text becomes a locus of exploration, and particularly, I suggest, of affect. As Hillary Chute argues, The basic structural form of comics—which replicates the structure of traumatic memory with its fragmentation, condensation, and placement of elements in space—is able to express the movement of memory. It both evokes and provokes memory: placing themselves in space, authors may forcefully convey the shifting layers of memory, and create a peculiar entry point for representing experience. (“Materializing Memory” 2011, 293) The impacts of illness on the individual, their families, and the social sphere are enlivened through the complexity of the “structural form of comics”. These nuances are often retained rather than resolved so that experiences of pain find a depth of expression as they are organised over time and space – an analogue to the body in pain. Moreover, they document the way that illness and disease impact not only the individual, but also charts how family members configure the recognition of pain through its reception and reflection. In the pages of Epileptic, for example, readers observe an attentive Pierre-François as he rushes around to brace JeanChristophe’s epileptic attacks, his sense of anticipation and care in plain view. By displaying the complexity of responses to signs of the body in pain, the stories also provide “a conduit through which isolated experiences can become recognised as common”, thereby functioning “in line with documentary” as a form of “public discourse”, as Mickwitz describes (2016, 134). Will Eisner has argued that in comics, “body posture and gesture occupy a position of primacy over text”, and that “[t]he manner in which these images are employed modifies and defines the intended meaning of the words” (2004, 103). Indeed, the relational tension between gesture and context operates within a readily identifiable linguistic-visual domain in comics. Paraskeva suggests that “[l]inguistic exchanges are grounded in the occasion of the utterance” (2013, 2) and so too are gestural signifiers. For example, readers will notice that in Stitches the sound effect ‘WHAP’ accretes in significance as various characters slam doors and cupboards throughout the story. The iterative and recursive impact of this device means that the episodes that constitute Small’s story become linked to one another through an embodied and repeated sound-act that ‘echoes’ throughout the text in a non-linear and associative manner – much like the appearance of traumatic memory as something that arises in a seemingly haphazard and intrusive manner onto what may otherwise be imagined as being a linear unfolding of ‘non-traumatised’ time.

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Epileptic by David B[eauchard] In Epileptic, the plasticity of the comics form allows B. to imagine his avatar’s confusion, rage, and grief in his response to his brother’s ongoing battle with epilepsy. The complexities of the author’s feelings frequently find expression through his depictions of war and conflict. As he explains, [A] crisis of epilepsy is, by definition, something very difficult to represent realistically […] I wanted to try to translate that: the evolution of my eyes on the crises of Jean-Christophe [B.’s brother]. What has never changed is the violence and brutality of these crises. (Ciment and Groensteen 2004) Personal history and public discourses around epilepsy are entwined in B.’s rendition, wherein he installs a tripartite story structure that narrates his brother’s illness, their family life, and the construction of his imagination (Ciment and Groensteen 2004), alongside his development as an artist – so that the text shares some of the attributes of a künstlerroman. Each of these strands adds to the work’s attentiveness to the multiple valences of autobiographical memory. Rendered in black and white, B.’s lyrical, confronting, and meticulous drawings access the anger and grief that Jean-Christophe’s condition provokes for the narrator, his family, and for Jean-Christophe himself. As Stephen Tabachnik describes, the book “vibrates with activity inside its covers in the form of strife-filled, crowded, and dynamic and shadowy panels” (2011, 105). B. does not excuse any of the characters, including himself, from scrutiny, and instead offers an intimate portrait of a family negotiating a condition from which there is only sporadic respite. The absence of effective treatments in the ongoing search among doctors, quacks, and gurus, creates a cycle of hope, disappointment, rage, and despair that B. mediates through the signs that crowd the panels; the work is replete with icons, symbolism of the occult and arcana, metaphors, and dreams. Together, these create a fantastical textual space that offers some relief from the emotions that buffet B. and his family, while simultaneously structuring the ‘felt space’ of the text to reflect the lived experiences he is recalling. Specifically, I argue that the arrangement of space in Epileptic is not only shaped through B.’s influences listed below, but also from a typological work of the Middle Ages, the Biblia pauperum that, as Anke te Heesen explains, provided “excerpts from the Bible used as source material for sermons and instruction given by the pauperes, men and women living in devout poverty” (2002, 66). The combination of the spoken word and images was intended to allow issues of faith to become more clearly “related to the world of human experience and everyday life” (66). The detailed construction of the panels in Epileptic are reminiscent of the Biblia pauperum, uniting different spaces of action as they help support the narration of his story.4 For example, page 164 of the English language version of Epileptic depicts B. standing against a rocky landscape within an inverted

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‘T’-shaped panel, with two panels positioned above. These panels depict his parents and Florence, respectively. The arrangement here helps unite disparate spaces of ‘action’ indicated by the variation of backgrounds on display. Taken together, they form a triptych of sorts, where readers can read each panel within the context of the others, and immerse themselves in the composition of the page, which is suggestive of an illustrated epic, much like the scenes depicted in the Biblia pauperum. The subsequent page inverts the spatial arrangement of the panels as B. informs the reader that at the end of 1970 he decides to change his name (from Pierre-François to David). He states, “Though I don’t realize it at the time, it’s a symbolic act. I’ve won the war [against epilepsy]” (165). The triumph of this moment is supported by the structure of the page, with David now standing triumphantly at the base of the ‘T’, his helmet removed. B. harnesses the energy of multiple aesthetic designs, incorporating them into the gravitas of his own visual ecology. B.’s style is heavily influenced by cinema, his dramatic monochromatic arrangements with Dutch angles, and elongated shadows evocative of German Expressionist films such as Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), Fritz Lang’s Doctor Mabuse the Gambler (1922), but also in the way that his chiaroscuro lighting recalls Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast (1955) with its darkened, and constricted, interiors. As with Satrapi’s Persepolis, the satirical humour of Otto Nuckel, Franz Masereel, and Lynd Ward’s respective monochromatic wordless novels, composed in woodcuts, is also evident, as is the quiet, quizzical, and sometimes grotesque horror of Charles Burns and Thomas Ott. The surrealism of Fellini in Satyricon (1969) can be felt in the grotesque creatures that populate the pages of the novel, but also his neo-realism in an early panel reminiscent of the surrealistic parade in 81/2 (1962) as an array of doctors dance around Pierre-François and his family. Pre-modern visual influences such as scenes of battle on Greek vases, Surrealist paintings, and scenes of battle from Italian Renaissance painting are also evident in the work5 (Ciment and Groensteen 2004). B. also conveys the impact of occult and esoteric magazines, the surrealist collages of Max Ernst, and films like Pasolini’s One Thousand and One Nights (1974) and Little Big Man (1970) by Arthur Penn on his art. These intertexts act as important touchstones that support B.’s storytelling, providing a range of cinematic, surreal, and expressionist influences whose at-times frenzied inclusion within Epileptic speaks to the intensity of David’s lived experience. This intensity is perhaps common to many experiences of the twentieth century such as we saw in the multiple levels of signification in The Four Immigrants Manga, and in Tan’s The Arrival, which uses similar elements to invest the process of migration with bewildering strangeness. As an intimate witness to his brother’s pain, Pierre-François introduces the reader to the multiple visual strategies through which he attempts to understand the attacks that ravage Jean-Christophe. As Gilmore suggests, “pain offers specific knowledge; it is made and remade as it is interpreted visually and verbally” (“Covering Pain” 2015, 115). B. has himself described the

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process of retrieval and discharge that the act of drawing permits, namely that, “[i]t is by placing the pen on paper that reflection takes shape. She (sic) needs to rely on a practice. We put ourselves in a state […] when we draw and it allows emotions to be released and come to the surface” (Ciment and Groensteen 2004). B. explains that he enjoyed making Epileptic not only in relation to the psychological space of the text, but also in a material sense in which he could “leave [his] pain on the paper” so that the “act of drawing was like a medicine” (Gravett). He emphasises the importance of drawing as a mode through which he could translate his emotions, as well as trying to “concretise the memories that [he] had”, and “what [he] had seen” (Bellefroid). The translation of memories for B. is thus simultaneously a creative and re-constitutive process that allowed him to access images from his childhood and early adulthood. In this recreation, the visual presence of the body, its contortions and gestures speak to its role as what Crapanzano describes elsewhere as “a construct of complex social, cultural, and linguistic processes that not only affect[s] its ‘biological’ character but its symbolism and rhetorical potential” (2004, 71). In Epileptic the reader is met with myriad forms of signification that speak of Jean-Christophe’s epilepsy inscribed on and through his and other people’s bodies. B. adorns the page with multiple representations of his brother, sister, parents, and himself that not only reflect how their lives are being impacted by epilepsy, but also how their environment shapes the ways in which the disease is configured and received. For example, in one passage readers become aware of the transgressive potential of seeing. While on a family holiday, Jean-Christophe suffers a seizure. The caption recalls, “[a]ll the tourists rush up, eager to enjoy this new diversion” (235), their faces scored so that they appear skull-like. Engorged with excitement, the onlookers’ distorted eyes and bodies swarm around Jean-Christophe. The tension is elevated in the next panel as his body occupies the entire width of the middle panel, a technique that B. deploys throughout Epileptic to convey the impact of ill health. While Jean-Christophe’s face is initially depicted without any marks, his face now acquires the same kind of lines that were previously visible only in the face of the onlookers. The family stand protectively around Jean-Christophe, his father telling the crowd, “[y]es he’s my son. He’s just not feeling well”, with arms placed on his son’s oversized body. B. grapples with his own desire to disappear from this scene, before deciding to stay. In the next panel, with the crisis averted, Jean-Christophe appears in proportion with the figures of B. and their father, though his features remain darkened by suffering. The crowd now fills the background, their faces highly distorted with bulging eyes and alien features, and they continue to occupy this space over the next seven panels (236–237). By playing with the proportions of these different bodies in sequence, B. conveys the claustrophobic effect of the crowd’s attention on Jean-Christophe and his family, and the palpable impact of the social stigma associated with epilepsy.

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B.’s drawing practice itself is bound up with his attempts to filter the affective impact of his brother’s condition, such as when he likens his relentless portrayal of epic battles as his “own form of epilepsy” (20), emphasising his embodied journey alongside Jean-Christophe’s. Indeed, throughout the work, the reader encounters a doubling between B. and his brother, such that Jean-Christophe’s illness does not remain bound up solely within his body, but highlights its familial and social impacts. Susan M. Squier calls this the “socio-somatics of disability”, that is, “how disability feels and what an impairment means socially for the disabled person and [their] family members” (italics in original, “Grow Out of It” 2008, 74). The doubling between the brothers is structured through identification as well as misrecognition, a process that marks the beginning of B.’s story. B. locates the first panel of the book in 1994, at his parents’ house in Olivet, and draws himself brushing his teeth as he looks in the mirror. The next panel introduces a person we will soon come to know as Jean-Christophe, walking into the bathroom, unaccompanied by any narrative voiceover. In the third panel, the brothers face one another in front of the mirror, Jean-Christophe stating, “It’s…me…” (ellipses in original, 2), as B. fails to recognise him. The narrative voice reenters the subsequent panel, “[i]t takes a moment for me to recognize the guy who just walked in. It’s my brother” (2). His brother’s statement, “Don’t wanna…get in y’r way…” is contained inside two speech bubbles immediately below a depiction of the latter’s face, which occupies roughly three-quarters of the panel. Its black background provides a sense of visual continuity with the second panel where Jean-Christophe’s face appears as though emerging discombobulated from a void. Moreover, the dimensions with which B. depicts his brother’s face contrast with Jean-Christophe’s communication – that is, the latter’s face looms out of the darkness in a way that speaks to the emotional, rather than practical, significance of his presence. The brothers’ estrangement is visible through the literalisation of a memory trace on the page. The comic encodes this affective regime within the opening pages of B’s story, where B. uses the plasticity of representation to depict Jean-Christophe’s appearance in various guises. In the example above, the latter’s face may also be associated with the illuminating presence of the moon, as it appears similar to a full moon against a night sky, filling David’s attachment to him within its round contours. Jean-Christophe’s physical and spatial configurations at the start of the story thus anticipate the outsized proportions that his condition will acquire in B.’s story. For now, B. has seen his brother “without his public face on” for the first time, and describes “scars all over his body” and continues, “[h]is eyebrows are criss-crossed by scabs. The back of his head is bald from all the times he’s fallen. He’s enormously bloated from medication and lack of exercise” (2). This page carries the physical marks of Jean-Christophe’s journey, signified on his body, as they foreground some of his lived experiences that the reader will encounter. Indeed, B. has commented on the way that the repeated crises brought about and by the epileptic attacks are “practically inscribed” on his brother’s body (Ciment and Groensteen 2004). As with

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David Small’s avatar in Stitches, the representation of the body is a key aspect through which memories are encoded, signifying the ruptures of the past within the present. In the opening scene, Jean-Christophe explains to David (previously Pierre-François) that he now has “fake teeth” before mumbling “Brush teeth … Brush … brush teeth”. In response, David states “[g]o ahead, I’m done”, and then, “[a]ll right then…good night” to his seemingly nonresponsive brother (2). Here, the gutters reinforce the fragmented connection between the brothers, carving out a recollected space that signifies the silence wrapped around the moment-to-moment transitions. In this scene, the gutters do not so much offer closure as they emphasise the disjointed nature of the brothers’ communication. The next page relocates the narrative back in time to Orléans, 1964, when Pierre-François is 5, Jean-Christophe 7, and their sister, Florence, is 4 years old. This marks the year that Jean-Christophe will start suffering epileptic attacks, and the transition in the narrative to this time reinforces its significance in B.’s memory. Around the same time, Pierre has a dream in which he encounters Anubis, the Ancient Egyptian god of the dead, and the effect of this nightmare is to inoculate Pierre against “ghosts, witches, vampires, devils”, although he will still fear “people, life, the future” (17). This pantheon of familiars will accompany him for much of the book, carving out an imagined space for Pierre to converse and express his fears. The Expressionist shadows cast by Anubis – which Pierre soon realises are thrown by a closet door – will reappear repeatedly, albeit in different forms, throughout the story, reminding the reader of his fears about “people”, “life” and “the future”. B. regularly plays with panel and object dimensions as a way of representing these fears. He frequently depicts himself as disproportionately small in a way that conveys his lack of control over the wellbeing of his family, such as when he operates on his ailing grandfather, or when he covers his brother’s supine body with arrows in a visual gesture reminiscent of Saint Sebastian’s martyrdom, Frida Kahlo’s “The Wounded Deer” (1946), and which also references a childhood book written by the brothers about their sister, entitled, “the marterdom of florence” (sic 12). The caption accompanying this panel states, “[a] nd I want to murder the entire world”, as David stands on Jean-Christophe, bow and arrow in hand. B. configures Jean-Christophe’s body such that it acts as the physical landscape in this panel, undulating with the curves of his body as it stretches from one panel edge to another. The disproportion between David and Jean-Christophe’s bodies speaks of the way that the latter has become David’s ‘world’, thereby providing equivalence between its written and visual forms of signification. His brother’s stylised body is littered with arrows that symbolise David’s murderous rage, reminiscent of Washizu’s death in Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (1957). B. thus utilises a diverse visual taxonomy to illustrate the intensity of his imaginative mind and memories of his childhood experiences. His drawings provide a form of release, and protection, from the charged environment at home, which B. describes as his “armour” in which he “locks [himself] ever more tightly” over time (164).

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For B., personal and collective memories become inextricably entwined, and he describes this directly in relation to his adoption of the pen-name, David B., as a decision explicitly connected to the suffering of the Jewish people and that of his brother. His new name also marks a shift in his understanding of the battles he has so long admired. The caption states, “[i]t became clear to me that the Genghis Khan I loved so dearly was not so far removed [from the Holocaust], with his massacres of Peking, of Samarkand […] Nishapur, Bamiyan, Herat” (173). His mother explains that she wanted to call him David but that his grandfather thought “it sounded too Jewish” (170). The name thus acquires multiple levels of meaning, and continues to do so, as B. explains in an interview, [t]he question of the Genocide, the Shoah, is for me automatically linked to the disease of Jean-Christophe. To see him die every day, one ends up feeling that he has witnessed a great number of deaths, and therefore a sort of massacre […] In this fury of the disease, there is something like a desire to destroy. (Ciment and Groensteen 2004) B. links his experience of his brother’s condition with collective memories of the Holocaust, where its ongoing impact plays an active role in the present as people “die every day”. Moreover, the “desire to destroy” refers not only to the impact of epilepsy on Jean-Christophe’s well-being, but can also be understood in relation to the rage that B. experiences towards his brother during their childhood and in relation to epilepsy itself. The comics form allows B. to structure and visualise these hitherto unexpressed memories of the past through a particular visual aesthetic and written narrative that draw on explicit and implicit memories. The ongoing and repeated epileptic attacks form a chain of events that for David continue to place an understanding of the condition in abeyance, rather than a single, surmountable episode. David’s desperation to apprehend the epilepsy that ravages his brother, and which also instils a psychic trauma that remains outside of his grasp, lies at the heart of the story. Like the Holocaust, Jean-Christophe’s seizures are impossible to narrate experientially as they reside within the locus of the real. This circumstance is reflected in David’s lament, “How many epileptic seizures has Jean-Christophe had since the onset of his illness? How many times has he died a little? How many seizures has he suffered during his life?” (175). These questions are placed within three successive panels that depict Jean-Christophe’s contorted body falling against a black background, while David looks on, a witness to his brother’s suffering. The space of the third panel is entirely occupied by multiple versions of Jean-Christophe’s contorted figure, layered in a heap. Here, B. deliberately creates a visual parallel to the Holocaust [also reminiscent of Spiegelman’s depiction of the bodies that pile beneath his artist’s easel in Maus (2003, 201)]. The power of comics to link representations of traumatic memory through the connective tissue of the text is brought into relief; two pages earlier,

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B. includes a panel that contains the body of a camp inmate (173), hands clenched in a way that signifies not only the destruction of 6 million people, but which acquires other levels of meaning through its mimicry of Jean-Christophe’s contortions during an epileptic attack, which in turn references an earlier sequence in which B. depicts the members of a commune as he imagines murdering them after being shocked by their hypocritical attitudes towards his brother’s epilepsy (107). The association between these disparate sequences is particularly valuable for the representation of traumatic memory, as the relationship between space, memory, and affect is embedded synchronically and diachronically within the structure of the text. B.’s reference to the Shoah thus carries with it particular import in relation to his brother’s epilepsy as well as B.’s adoption of his Jewish name – an entanglement of personal and collective histories. As Jan Baetens and Pascal Lefèvre observe, “far from presenting itself as a chain of panels, the comic demands a reading capable of searching, beyond linear relations, to the aspects or fragments of panels susceptible to being networked with certain aspects or fragments of other panels” (quoted in Groensteen 2007, 146). The battle for Jean-Christophe’s health commences with visits to doctors, a psychopedagogical institute, and the depersonalised world of Professor T, a neurosurgeon who wants to operate on him who B. depicts at once entirely detached from his patient yet fanatical about the necessity of the operation. At the hospital, the Beauchard family observes a young boy who is paralysed following a ‘successful’ operation by the Professor. This episode represents a frightening version of the biomedical model, with the Professor’s unchallenged authority acting as a source of fear and mistrust. B.’s parents decide against the operation, invoking the Professor’s wrath as he kicks them out of the examination room. Here, the story demonstrates how the patient’s own instincts can step into the breach as another source of authority and meaning; reading an issue Planète – a French magazine exploring fantastic realism (1961–1972) – Jean-Christophe learns about the teachings of George Oshawa, the founder of zen macrobiotics, which he decides to adopt. The family soon joins a commune in Artemare where they fully adapt to a macrobiotic lifestyle. The dietary intervention carries on a tradition from antiquity where adjustments in diet were considered essential to treating epilepsy. Divergent discourses around epilepsy, its causes and cures, have long held a place in cultural memory; where Babylonian texts associated the illness with spiritual possession and malaise, the physician Hippocrates attempted to uncover its medical roots as a brain dysfunction, while Aristotle described it arising from a melancholic humour and associated it with “intermittent badness” in his treatise On Sleep and Waking (350 B.C. E.). Magiorkinis et al. note Aristotle’s sustained influence on the treatment of epilepsy in the post-Hippocratic era into the medieval era, as “the Catholic Church considered his teachings indisputable and beyond any criticism” (2010, 105). The association between ‘badness’ and the epileptic condition is apparent in Epileptic, where the street gang that the brothers

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play with in their youth expel Jean-Christophe, claiming that he is “nuts” and “violent” because they misinterpret his clutching actions at the onset of a seizure for strangulation (35). As a young man, Jean-Christophe remains vulnerable to negative judgments, particularly when he experiences a seizure while out with his family. Beauchard displays the distress of this event through his brother’s outsized body laying dormant while surrounded by speech balloons from a disembodied crowd, shouting “Asylum!”, “Crazy!”, “Shouldn’t be outside!”, then “Junkie!”, “Dead!”, “Police!” (131). The relentless array of crazed responses emerging from an abstracted background of faces renders the felt space of the scene as a hostile and threatening one, where Beauchard’s family must defend Jean-Christophe from policemen and passers-by alike. Though macrobiotics offers a temporary reprieve for Jean-Christophe, he suffers another seizure 6 months after starting this treatment, and from then on their frequency and severity escalates. Pierre becomes highly attuned to his brother’s condition, and describes running behind the latter to cushion his falls, a highly empathic and responsive action that demonstrates his care for his brother. The strain of Jean-Christophe’s epileptic attacks is taken up in Pierre’s vivid fantasy life, which now incorporates a new imaginary that attempts to brings order to chaos; he imagines himself as “a great surgeon”, who saves his recently deceased grandfather by removing a blood clot, and this time in control of the imagined operation (87). This invocation of control supports the ongoing reference to the psychic armour that Pierre pieces together from childhood onwards. The battles on paper find their real-life analogue in the physical and psychic battles that Pierre experiences with his brother, and B. frequently depicts their intertwined bodies as they tussle and fight with one another, a sign of their aggression and intimacy. One of the most dominant metaphors that B. uses to depict his brother’s epilepsy is a dragon-like creature that weaves its way in, through, and around Jean-Christophe’s body. In an early scene, B. depicts his brother standing triumphant with a sword in hand, having slain the epilepsy dragon as the caption informs the reader that “[a]fter several months, he is no longer on any medication, he no longer has any seizure. He’s cured” (52). The solid lines and graphic markings of the dragon are reminiscent of Native American totems, and convey the power and mystery associated with epilepsy. The way that the creature envelops Jean-Christophe’s body can be associated with the etymology of epilepsy from the Greek word epilambanein, which means “to seize, posses, or afflict” (Magiorkinis et al. 2010, 104). This speaks to the isolation and mystery that surrounds David’s experience of his brother’s ongoing epileptic attacks, but also provides a form of visualising his condition so that it becomes more knowable in some way. As Ian Williams suggests, “[w]here language is lacking to describe bodily sensations or complex emotional states, metaphor can play a vital role in communication” (2012, 25). The figure of the dragon is associated with strength, aggression, and primordial power – feelings experienced by both Jean-Christophe and his brother, and its mythos reveals some of the ways in which his epilepsy is directly, and indirectly experienced. B.’s

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portrayal of the ailment accesses its portrayal in Babylonian antiquity as a maleficent illness brought forth by supernatural forces, also apparent in its conception in Ancient Egyptian, Aztec, and Incan cultures. Aretaeus of Cappadocia’s (1st/2nd century A.D.) description of a grand mal seizure is striking in the way that its description resembles B.’s drawings of his brother’s contorted body: The calamity bears a resemblance to slaughtered bulls; the neck bent, the head variously distorted, for sometimes it is arched, as it were, forwards, so that the chin rests upon the breast […] the tongue protrudes, so as to incur the risk of a great wound […] At the termination, [sufferers] are torpid in their members at first, experience heaviness of the dead […] and are languid, pale, spiritless and dejected from the suffering and shame of the dreadful malady. (cited in Magiorkinis et al. 2010, 106) Over the duration of Epileptic, Jean-Christophe’s face becomes noticeably larger and scored with the markings of epilepsy, which B. portrays in the style of ritual scarification. At times these marks extend to his arms and hands, and even to David’s own so that the doubling between the brothers is represented through the symbols inscribed on their respective bodies. In one sequence, the folds on B.’s blanket shift over three panels so that they begin to acquire an expression similar to Jean-Christophe’s, underscoring the pervasive and claustrophobic impact of the condition on David. Towards the end of the book, the panels become looser in their composition and less crowded by the crystalline structure that has heretofore dominated the story, as though B.’s memories themselves are becoming more fluid. Instead, the bodies and faces of the brothers occupy significant proportions of the frame which speaks to the pervasive influence of the past and its psychic terrain – literalised in the brothers’ disfiguration. The visual evolution is accompanied by B.’s account of the escalation in Jean-Christophe’s violent and paranoid behaviour, and his own aggressive responses. The backgrounds of these latter panels lose their earlier black solidity, instead acquiring a thoroughly scored texture, as though the force of the past has chipped away at their affective texture. In two panels, David’s body is entirely riddled with his and Jean-Christophe’s faces, with one of them declaring, “the past ties my insides in knots, screaming!” (281). Soon he fantasises about killing himself “messily” with a knife so that “[t]he anxiety, the fear, the justice, the rage” would “all come out at last” (289), his blood speaking for him, before dismissing the idea with the understanding that ink would allow his story to last longer (290). At Olivet a little while later, David stumbles across some fragments of writing by Jean-Christophe who “speaks of his despair and loneliness”, by which he is moved, writing, “the words might as well have come from my pen” (317). B.’s statement gestures towards the similarities between the brothers; Jean-Christophe’s feelings find a

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counterpart in his brother’s, and vice versa. Through his narrative, B.’s places Jean-Christophe’s story at the heart of his own. The significance of B.’s terror of losing his brother to epilepsy is powerfully condensed in a remembered dream towards the end of the book, called “the Face”, dated to “March 25th, 1998”. Represented within a single page, the dream sequence depicts Jean-Christophe’s face becoming increasingly misshapen under a series of blows from an “invisible adversary” against who David is powerless. The horrific impact of the dream arises in part from the static representation of Jean-Christophe, who remains seemingly powerless against the sequence that entirely submerges his face with “horrific sound” (343). Jean-Christophe’s gradual disfiguration recalls the covered faces in Magritte’s “The Lovers II” (1928) with its atmosphere of suffocation and mystery. The visual design of this sequence also evokes Magritte’s late work, “The Battle of the Argonne” (1964) with its notably tactile depiction of a cloud, and rock, locked in a seemingly rivalrous arrangement. The contrasting textures of these objects make them incongruous counterparts, and their juxtaposition speaks of the close, yet alienated, relationship between David and Jean-Christophe, as well as the seemingly ephemeral nature of epilepsy, rendered in the heavy line work of B.’s pen. This sequence forms a cornerstone of the narrative where B.’s projected fear of psychic deformation onto his brother condenses much of the anxiety of the story so far. Later, B. will project this concern onto his infertility, when he learns that his sperm are bifurcated so that they have either two heads or two tails. Across the panels, he wonders, “Am I a double myself? Or am I always just half of these monsters? Then who is the other half?” (326). The third panel on this page offers a ‘close-up’ of a sperm with two heads, portraying David and his brother, thereby illustrating the intimacy that B. feels towards his brother. Indeed, the book concludes with a sequence where B. dreams of Jean-Christophe’s death, represented by “all the faces in the world flickering across yours, for all of eternity” (361). B. concludes, “I figured that at some point…My face would be yours” (ellipsis in original 361–2). Despite the brothers’ estrangement, the dénouement of Epileptic confirms B.’s experience of his brother as a twin or double, whose lived experiences find an unconventional counterpart in B.’s own. This affective, non-diagnostic trajectory forms part of the critical and creative interventions of graphic medicine into the socio-familial dimensions of diagnosis, treatment, and the way in which their configurations are represented through particularised artistic strategies and visual lexicons.

David Small’s Stitches Drawing similarly offers a mode of solace and memorialisation in David Small’s Stiches: A Memoir, as it visualises and imagines his childhood structured through his relationship with his family (particularly his parents), and mapped onto a constructed imaginary of the past. Small has called drawing a “sophisticated kind of play therapy” (Davidson 2010). The memoir depicts

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the author’s childhood in an oppressive 1950s Detroit, Michigan, inducting the reader into a chilling family scene, where the young David grows up tormented by his relationship with his parents. By proxy, his story conveys the repressive political and social culture of the time, the rigid tension between his parents, and a belated discovery of his mother’s lesbianism. Stitches was, in Small’s words, “heavily influenced by cinema”, and he depicts the world of his youth with monochromatic inks and washes, playing with perspective, depth of field, and dissolves to convey the abject horror of his childhood and adolescence (Tindell 2012). The story is also characterised by its sparse dialogue and oppressive domestic scene, where sound effects stand in for unexpressed frustrations, and Small’s frequent use of Dutch angles (referring to a “canted shot” where the ‘camera’ – or in this case frame – is “angled clockwise or anticlockwise” (Chandler and Munday 2011) effectively convey the terror attendant on silences thick with unresolved tension. Born with sinus and digestive complications, David is a sickly child whose father, a radiologist, treats him with frequent doses of x-rays, in the belief they will cure his sinus problems. Unbeknownst to David, the treatment will leave its own precarious trace – a cancerous tumour in his throat that makes its presence felt when he is 11 years old. Undergoing two successive operations at the age of 15, the second of which removes half of his vocal cords, David is unable to speak above a whisper for more than a decade. It is not until a few weeks after the second operation that David stumbles across a letter locked in a writing bureau, and learns that he has had cancer. This discovery is portrayed in a scene that contains only the words from the letter, and which is otherwise silent. The memoir’s peripatetic structure is broken into chronological chapters when David is 6, 11, 14, and 15 years old, with a final chapter entitled, “A few years ago I had the following dream”. By dividing the book’s chapters into an unconventional arrangement, Small reinforces the affective significance of his memories as they cluster around particular episodes in time. Urged by his editor to provide a sense of narrative coherence, Small has explained that at first, his drawn recollections were overwhelming in the extensive memories they allowed him to access, noting that, “[s]tructuring the book was the hardest part of making it, for multiple reasons. One being that memories don’t have a structure; they don’t come back in sequence” (Powells). He explains that the memories he explores in the work came to him through images, and that his use of the graphic form, with its emphasis on silence and non-verbal communications, seemed ideal to explore what it meant, “being forbidden to speak as a child, and then having my voice taken away” (Abbott 2010). As an apparatus for exploring memory, the comic form offered a scaffold through which he organised his memories of his youth. Although the finished story is chronological, the spatio-temporal techniques he employs retain the disorienting force of these lived experiences. Elsewhere, he describes his visual technique for recollecting the past, starting by recalling an object in one room of his house and slowly building up the room in his

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mind. He explains that “[o]nce the room was furnished, all the ghosts came back and began doing their thing” (Davidson 2010). This approach to recollecting the past offers an inverse procedure to an Ancient Greek mnemonic practice of memorising information through what can be described as imaginative scaffolding. Citing Quintilian, the Roman rhetorician Frances Yates describes a process in which the ancient orator moves “in imagination through his memory building whilst he is making his speech, drawing from the memorised places the images he has placed on them (sic)” (1966, 3). This example also demonstrates the intimate connection between memory, space, and imagination. The opening sequence of Stitches mimics a crane shot in the way that the perspective opens on the industrial setting of Detroit. The sequence weaves its way through the city at dusk until it enters the lit doorway of Smalls’ family home, and finds, over three successive sequences, David drawing in the living room. One of David’s sketches is of a rabbit’s head, and its inclusion here foregrounds the significance of his therapist later in the story – who Small depicts as the White Rabbit from Alice in Wonderland. The next panel swivels towards the kitchen, where his mother is washing dishes. Her shadow is visible over the floor, and in the next panel, a ground-level child’s perspective, tilts upwards to find his mother’s back as she faces the sink. As he introduces his mother, Small distorts the panels through Dutch angles, a technique that he uses repeatedly throughout the story. Much like Epileptic, dreams play an important role for Small. Small discusses the significance of a dream about a crab as another motivation for writing his book, realising that the crab stood in for cancer, and the trauma of his youth, as he sketched a scene from the dream the following day (Konigsberg 2009). In these examples, the unconscious demands of the body provide the scaffolding on which the narrative begins to take shape. Small cites the influence of films by Bergman, Hitchcock, Polanski, and Buñuel, as well as the cinematic techniques embedded in novels such as Madame Bovary on the visual vocabulary of Stitches (Abbott 2010). Indeed, Dutch angles, as well as distorted perspectives, and uplighting are visible throughout the book, conventions of horror and thriller genres such as The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920) or the 1931 Universal Studio production of Frankenstein. A prominent example of Small’s use of uplighting is when he explains his father’s work on x-rays, a panel depicting a close-up of the latter and his colleagues “poring” over prints (26). With their eyes hidden behind the blank lenses of their glasses, the men do indeed appear as “soldiers of science” (27), with a depersonalised, even ruthless, approach to their field of investigation. As an adolescent, David will repeatedly go to the cinema to watch a film about a scientist driven mad by an experimental drug that gives him x-ray vision, and who eventually tears out his own eyes (215). In the penultimate section of the memoir, Small portrays himself in a composition reminiscent of the crossshaped shadow that falls on Ivor Novello’s face early in Hitchcock’s The Lodger (1927). Small’s version retains the closely cropped frame as he portrays his own face with a darkened vertical ink wash that reaches from the base of his neck to the top of the panel.

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Small also borrows from the visual grammar of cinema to convey the splintering of his identity in response to the traumatic events of his childhood. The use of multiple perspectives is perhaps most evident in a scene between David and his maternal grandmother, when she washes his hands forcefully under scalding hot water. Across four pages, Small uses at least 13 different angles, to focalise the terror of the incident (93–97). Indeed, the first nine panels are framed through nine different points of view, providing a sense of disintegration that David experiences from his grandmother’s use of violence. As Babette Rothschild observes, dissociation “appears to be a neurobiological phenomenon that occurs under extreme stress” and that it may be “the mind’s attempt to flee when flight is not possible” (2000, 66).6 Once his grandmother leaves the bathroom, the scene stabilises somewhat, but another diffraction emerges. As Small’s narrative voice notes, he remembers that while the incident was taking place, he could see the scene from his grandmother’s perspective as well as his own, and that “[f]or reasons I could not quite understand…I felt that she was justified…and that I deserved everything I had gotten” (ellipses in original, 97). The images accompanying these statements fracture along various lines of perspective through shifts in angles that mimic adult and child perspectives, as well as David’s reflection in the mirror, and images of his head along diagonal axes that mirror one another across two panels. The portrayal of division is also apparent in one of the book’s striking interstitial pages as two convex mirrors condense a hospital passageway (135). While one of the mirrors captures the figures of David and his mother, the other remains empty. Ostensibly, the reflections bring together a single moment in time which contains only those two characters, and yet, as the eye traverses between these reflections, it creates an impression in which David and his mother are simultaneously there and not-there – a thaumatrope that denies the reader the illusion of a persistence of vision and reinforces the fragmented nature of the bond between mother and son through its formal structure. David’s desire for Irene Dillon, a family friend with whom his mother has a concealed sexual relationship, coincides with Irene’s discovery of the growth on David’s neck. David helps Irene on with her coat. As she turns to thank him, David gazes at her and for a moment, it seems that she is also transfixed. This sequence incorporates close, tilted crops of both Irene and David’s faces in sequence – borrowing from cinematic convention. Almost immediately, however, this possibility is disrupted as Irene turns away and calls to David’s mother, exclaiming that David has a growth on his neck. In this moment, ‘growth’ offers multiple significations pertaining to sexual development and the tumescence of the cancer. The appearance of the latter recalls the images that David and his brother, Ted, previously perused in their father’s medical textbooks, and propels the narrative along its main trajectory. In his short comic “Why I Write” (2009), Small depicts himself as Frankenstein’s monster, whose decision to write Stitches was directly informed by the swelling of his throat in the same spot as when he was a child, but compressed into a matter of minutes. Recognising that the force

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of the inflammation could kill him “on the spot” (25), Small decided that he somehow had to release the trauma of his childhood, and that he would create the book (Abbott 2010). The title, Stitches, refers not only to the sutures on David’s throat, but also the way that he utilises multiple intertexts, most notably, Alice in Wonderland, to tell his story. As Small explains, “[k]ids don’t know what the hell’s going on […] [t]hey haven’t been alive long enough to understand. But they do see and they do remember” (italics in original, Davidson 2010). The affective disconnect between doctor and patient is readily apparent in Small’s story, supplemented by the technological apparatus available to the physicians. Among a list of other devices, Thomas Couser notes the x-ray as a mechanism through which the “medical gaze” has obtained “increasingly detailed and ‘objective’ evidence of the body’s internal workings” (1997, 21). While the development of technologies such as x-rays, along with the microscope, and other tools of visual analysis has undoubtedly been of immense value for the purpose of diagnosis, comics artists have also incorporated them into their graphic lexicon to visualise their encounters with the processes that shape social and personal experiences of illness and disease. Small’s rendering of x-rays in Stiches is testament to this impulse, which is also evident most notably in the work of Phoebe Gloeckner, a comics artist and medical illustrator, in The Diary of a Teenage Girl (2015) and A Child’s Life and Other Stories (2001). Small incorporates representations of x-rays in Stitches to convey his memories of the past, linking the anguished space of the body with his fraught domestic scene. In one sequence, Small moves from the particular to the abstract, and back to the specific to commence a visual transition between one episode and the next, where he discovers that he has unknowingly had cancer. In this transition, Small adapts the basic structure of the stitches laced across his throat to an abstracted representation, before shifting to a nonfigurative configuration overleaf, finally settling on the structure of a staircase that he painfully ascends (191). The process by which the sutures acquire a liminal and intangible quality before solidifying into a more concrete form mimics the movement of traumatic memory. The stitches act as a floating signifier – their lines not only representing the way in which memories are cleaved – that is, fractured and refitted – by trauma, but also in the way that they weave otherwise disparate narrative segments together. A few pages hence, there is an extended scene-to-scene silent transition lasting 10 pages, following David’s discovery of a letter written by his mother to her mother revealing he has cancer. The line “of course the boy does not know it was cancer” is broken up over 10 panels, repeated in various permutations above a close-up of David’s eyes over the letter (205). By splintering David’s apprehension of his illness over 10 panels, Small conveys the shock of this realisation. Each of the panels frames David’s eyes at a different angle, the darkened hue of the letter signalling the devastation of the secret it bears. This sequence is devoid of any retrospective captions, plunging the reader into

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the silence of the scene, broken only by the splintered words from the letter. Moreover, Small reveals only the back of the letter so that readers interpret the scene by ‘reading’ David’s eyes as he absorbs its contents. The moment-to-moment transitions in this sequence, accompanied by the fragmented text, convey its devastation as they ask the reader to remain within the grip of its passage, much like David himself. The final full-width panel dispenses with the letter as the reader gazes directly into David’s despairing eyes. The full sentence, “Of course the boy does not know it was cancer”, remains, literally hanging over this frame, whose bleaker shading provisionally contains the emotional shock of the revelation. As an adolescent, David runs away from boarding school three times, and is eventually referred to a therapist. As the memoir states, “the therapist saved my life”, and depicts one of their meetings, where he is informed that, “your mother doesn’t love you” (256), at which David breaks down and holds on to the therapist’s legs. After this session, the affective significance of this moment spills over into an extended purely visual scene-to-scene sequence that portrays an undefined passage of time. Small utilises an abstract sequence of falling rain across different panel dimensions to link an ambiguous passage of time. Read together, the rain eventually appears to subside to a single drop, whose emanations are visible as it falls into a pool of water. The rain is a clear allusion to tears, and the ebb and flow of emotions that come to pass following David’s discovery of his condition. Gesture and memory Small has explained that he used a system of gestural signification in Stitches to represent the human form, intended to hasten the drawing process and “not be bogged down by making everything accurate” (Abbott 2010). While gesture has been studied in relation to its impact on memory, the articulation of this sign-system in comics also relates to the way that line work embeds fragments from the past on the page. Writing on gesture and recollection, Richard Cándida Smith asks, “[w]hat does a gesture, whether congealed in the movement of a hand, the rise in the pitch of a voice, or in the shape of a fabricated object, contribute to meaning?” (2003, 16). Small highlights the significance of these non-verbal gestures by “materializing” (Chute Graphic Women 2010, 95) their presence through the images in his story. In this respect, gesture can be understood as the performance of an interior state, or a projection of unspoken feelings that its subject wants others to perceive. Hence, gesture is intimately linked to memory and identity as it accumulates various layers of signification, as evident in Stitches. Even before he loses his voice, Small depicts David as a quiet child, hemmed in by the rigidity of his mother’s anger and his father’s reserve. As a young boy in a house stymied by unspoken frustrations, David learns to express himself by “getting sick”, his brother plays the drums, and their father uses a punching bag in the basement of the house (19). Indeed, the first line of the book, “Mama had her little cough” (4), establishes the eminence of non-verbal forms

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of communication throughout the work. This passage continues to portray his mother’s fragmented presence through an unspoken language of coughs, sobs, and the “WHAP” of closing doors, such as it forms the first ‘sound’ within the memoir (emphasis in original 4). A distinct element of the text is the way that sound effects are emphasised, written in large, bold letters. Readers see and hear David’s mother’s “WHAP” of the cupboard doors (4) repeated when his father slaps him (44), when his grandmother bangs on the door (95), and then echoed in David’s own actions as he closes a door (195). The multiple angles through which each of these scenes are focalised supplement Anthony Paraskeva’s argument that “gestures must be seen to be understood” (2013, 2). In these examples, the visual and the verbal elements of the text unite to amplify the “illocutionary force” of the gesture, contrary to what Paraskeva identifies as their separation in written texts (3). Another particularly ominous sound effect is the “snap” when his grandmother breaks a piece of chalk, a precursor to her actions when David visits her, but also later in the story, when she sets her house alight having locked her husband in the basement (2013, 277). Small has emphasised the vital importance of non-verbal forms of communication, explaining, I had to develop my skills in reading body language and nuance as a survival tactic in our household. If Mother had ‘that look,’ you got out of the way fast. Then, the next moment, you would hear her chirping away to a friend on the telephone, talking about how everything was ‘fine’ and how ‘happy and healthy’ we all were. (italics in original, Tindell 2012) David’s extreme alienation from his family is structured through the comic’s formal apparatus, such as sound effects and gestures – both non-verbal signifiers – that immerse readers within the remembered strictures of his youth. Readers can therefore identify how the inherent division within the comics form, the usual (though not always) division between words and images, can be productively utilised to re-create the split between appearances and reality, such as in Small’s reference to his mother’s behaviour. This expands what Chute refers to as the “idiom of witness”, namely, “a manner of testifying that sets a visual language in motion with and against the verbal in order to embody individual and collective experience, to put contingent selves and histories into form” (Graphic Women 2010, 3).

Conclusion This chapter has examined the work of two comics in imagining and casting illness through the co-constitutive interaction of written and visual languages. The way that comics retain the separation between these elements on the static surface of the page means that readers must creatively navigate the

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metaphorical and physical distance between the verbal and visual components of the text. Comics resuscitate such instances from their invisibility in time – the small, often minuscule gestures that can speak as loudly as any formal commandment. As Hillary Chute suggests, “[c]omics highlights the relation between words and images—and therefore addresses itself to the nature of the difficulty of representing extreme situations and experiences” (Why Comics? 2017, 63). Both texts demonstrate the way that the comics form can map the diversity of lived experiences onto the surface of the page, structured through composite arrangements of words, images, gestures, perspectives, and line work to convey memories of illness and disease. The following chapter on The Photographer: Inside War-Torn Afghanistan with Doctors Without Borders and Waltz with Bashir, continues to examine representation of traumatic memory, this time through the visual intersections of documentary comics with photography and animation, and in the context of war and conflict.

Notes 1 In 2017, The University of Dundee produced Fibromyalgia and Us, a comic that explores fibromyalgia through multiple perspectives, and which was written in collaboration with a doctor and physiotherapist from NHS-Tayside. The aim of the comic is to raise awareness about fibromyalgia within the general community, as well as for people living with the condition, their families, as well as the medical community, particularly as the condition is not always well-understood. The comic is available at: https://discovery. dundee.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/19373070/FIBRO_COMIC_27_11_17_v2.pdf. 2 For the majority of the analysis in this chapter, I use B.’s surname to refer to the author, and Pierre-François to refer to the author’s childhood avatar. Around halfway through Epileptic, however, there is a flash-forward to where the latter has changed his name to David Beauchard, configured in his pen name as “David B.” (pp. 94–95) and the discussion reflects this change. I adopt the same strategy in relation to Stitches, where ‘Small’ refers to the authorial voice, and ‘David’ to the text’s avatar. 3 For an in-depth analysis of epilepsy and cultural meaning, see Colin Grant, A Smell of Burning: A Memoir of Epilepsy (2016). Grant’s memoir looks at the history of epilepsy, triangulated through his brother’s condition, much like Beauchard’s approach in Epileptic. 4 Readers may observe that Beauchard also utilises scrolls as part of non-narrative effects, on pages 162 and 163, for example, and also as a narrative device, perhaps most notably with the closing quotation from Fernando Pessoa, “Sit under the sun/ Abdicate/And be your own king” (362). 5 The German Epilepsy Museum website has a catalogue of artworks that relate specifically to the representation of epilepsy (accessed 26 Oct 2017). 6 In her analysis of dissociation and flashbacks in traumatic memory (2000, 65–71), Rothschild includes a strip from Watterson’s Calvin & Hobbes, which portrays an extended tussle between the two upon Calvin’s arrival home. This sequence is notable for its representation of fragmented, ‘dissociative’ time. The strip is portrayed through 14 panels of equal proportion but achieves an extraordinary level of dynamism through the arrangement of the characters’ bodies and the white space that signifies their frenzied displacement beyond the frame. The first three panels have a black background that heightens the reader’s sense of anticipation as Calvin

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calls out “hello”, before it switches to white as Hobbes launches his ‘attack’. The strip concludes with Calvin asking Hobbes, “Have you ever noticed how time slows down in a catastrophe?”. The latter’s response, “Sighhh…and the good times are always over so fast”, reveals his opposite experience of the event. Waterson’s sequence design means that the passage of time can be read according to these seemingly contradictory experiences, and provides an excellent example of the mechanics of comics at play.

Bibliography Abbott, Alysia. “From Tales of Wonder to Tales of Horror: David Small Dissects Stitches”. Neiman Storyboard. 14 May 2010. Accessed 19 November 2017. Web. B.[eauchard], David. Epileptic. Trans. Kim Thompson. New York: Pantheon Books, 2005. Print. Bellefroid, Thierry. “Interview de David B.: L’Ascension du Haut Mal…”. BD Paradisio. http://www.bdparadisio.com/intervw/davidb/intdavid.htm. Accessed 17 July 2017. Web. Bogart, Anne. The Director Prepares: Seven Essays on Art and the Theater. New York: Routledge, 2001. Print. Chandler, Daniel and Rod Munday. Oxford Dictionary of Media and Communication. First Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Print. Chute, Hillary. Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Print. Chute, Hillary. “Materializing Memory: Lynda Barry’s One Hundred Demons”, in Graphic Subjects: Critical Essays on Autobiography and Graphic Novels. Ed. Michael A. Chaney. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011: 282–309. Print. Chute, Hillary. Why Comics? From Underground to Everywhere. New York: HarperCollins, 2017. Print. Ciment, Gilles and Thierry Groensteen. “A Certain David B.”. 7 April 2004. gillescim ent.com. Accessed 17 July 2017. Web. Couser, Thomas. Recovering Bodies: Illness, Disability, and Life Writing. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997. Print. Crapanzano, Vincent. Imaginative Horizons: An Essay in Literary-Philosophical Anthropology. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Print. Davidson, Danica. “David Small Talks with The White Rabbit’s Grandniece”. The Comics Journal (2010). classic.tcj.com. Accessed 19 November 2017. Web. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Idiot. London: Penguin Classics, 2004. Print. Doucet, Julie. My New York Diary. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly Publications, 2011. Print. Eisner, Will. Comics and Sequential Art: Principles & Practice of the World’s Most Popular Art Form. Tamarac, FL: Poorhouse Press, 2004. Print. Forney, Ellen. Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo and Me. New York: Gotham Books (Penguin Books USA), 2012. Print. Gilmore, Leigh. “Covering Pain: Pain Memoirs and Sequential Reading as an Ethical Practice”. Biography 38. 1(2015): 104–117. Print. Gloeckner, Phoebe. A Child’s Life and Other Stories. Second Edition. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2001. Print. Gloeckner, Phoebe. The Diary of a Teenage Girl: An Account in Words and Pictures. Revised Edition. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2015. Print.

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Grant, Colin. A Smell of Burning: A Memoir of Epilepsy. London: Penguin Books, 2016. Print. Gravett, Paul. “David B.: The Armour of the Night”. http://www.paulgravett.com/a rticles/article/david_b. Accessed 17 July 2017. Web. Groensteen, Thierry. The System of Comics. Trans. Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2007. Print. Heesen, Anke te. The World in a Box: The Story of an Eighteenth-Century Picture Enclyclopedia. Trans. Ann M. Hentschel. Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Print. Jindal-Snape, Divya, et al. Fibromyalgia and Us: Living with Fibromyalgia. Dundee: University of Dundee, 2017. Print. Konigsberg, Eric. “Finding a Voice in Graphic Memoir”. New York Times. 7 September 2009. Print.Larkin, Ilana. “Absent Eyes, Bodily Trauma, and the Perils of Seeing in David Small’s Stitches”. American Imago 71. 2 (2014): 183–212. Print. Magiorkinis, Emmanouil, Kalliopi Sidiropoulou and AristidisDiamantis. “Hallmarks in the History of Epilepsy: Epilepsy in Antiquity”. Epilepsy & Behavior 17(2010): 103–108. Print. Magritte, René. “The Lovers II”, 1928. Oil on canvas. Museum of Modern Art, Manhattan, NY. Magritte, René. “The Battle of the Argonne”, 1959. Oil on canvas. Mickwitz, Nina. Documentary Comics: Graphic Truth-Telling in a Skeptical Age. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Print. Paraskeva, Anthony. The Speech Gesture Complex: Modernism, Theatre, Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013. Print. Powells. “The Powells.com Interview with David Small”. powellsbooks.blog. Accessed 19 November 2017. Web. Rothschild, Babette. The Body Remembers: The Psychophysiology of Trauma and Trauma Treatment. New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2000. Print. Small, David. “Why I Write”. Publishers Weekly. 31 August (2009): 23–25. Print. Small, David. Stitches: A Memoir. New York: W. W. Norton, 2009. Print. Smith, Richard Cándida (ed.). Art and the Performance of Memory: Sounds and Gestures of Recollection. London: Routledge, 2003. Spiegelman, Art. The Complete Maus. London: Penguin Books, 2003. Print. Squier, Susan M. “So Long as They Grow Out of It: Comics, The Discourse of Developmental Normalcy, and Disability”. Journal of Medical Humanities 29 (2008): 71–88. Print. Squier, Susan M. and J. Ryan Marks. “Introduction”. Configurations 22(2014): 149–152. Print. Streeton, Nicola. Billy, Me & You. Oxford: Myriad, 2011. Print. Tabachnick, Stephen E. “Autobiography as Discovery in Epileptic”, in Graphic Subjects: Critical Essays on Autobiography and Graphic Novels. Ed. Michael A. Chaney. Madison WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011: 101–115. Print. The Lodger: The Story of the London Fog. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Perf. June Tripp, Ivor Novello, Marie Ault, Arthur Chesney. London: Gainsborough Pictures, 1927. DVD. Throne of Blood [Kumo No Sujo-]. Dir. Akira Kurosawa. Perf. Toshirô Mifune and Minoru Chiaki. Tokyo: To-ho- Company Ltd, 1957. DVD. Tindell, Julia. “A Conversation with Illustrator David Small”. World Literature Today 86. 2(2012). worldliteraturetoday.org. Accessed 19 November 2017. Web.

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Vanistendael, Judith. When David Lost His Voice. London: SelfMadeHero, 2012. Print. Williams, Ian. “Graphic Medicine: Comics as Medical Narrative”. Medical Humanities 38(2012): 21–27. Print. Williams, Ian. The Bad Doctor. Oxford: Myriad, 2014. Print. Yates, Francis. Selected Works: The Art of Memory. Vol. III. London and New York: Routledge, 1966. Print.

Further reading Ahrens, Jörn. “Imagine Reality: Negotiating Comics with David B.’s Epileptic”. European Comic Art 7. 2(2014): 64–89. Print. Chaney, Michael A. Reading Lessons in Seeing: Mirrors, Masks and Mazes in the Autobiographical Graphic Novel. Jackson MS: University of Mississippi Press, 2017. Print. Del Pont, Xavier Marcó. “Confronting the Whiteness: Blankness, Loss and Visual Disintegration in Graphic Narratives”. Studies in Comics 3. 2(2012): 253–274. Di Bella, Maria Pia and James Elkins (eds). Representations of Pain in Art and Visual Culture. Routledge Advances in Art and Visual Studies. London and New York: Routledge, 2012. Print. Donovan, Courtney. “Graphic Patheographies”. Journal of Medical Humanities 35 (2014): 273–299. Print. El Refaie, Elisabeth. “Of Men, Mice, and Monsters: Body Images in David Small’s Stitches: A Memoir”. Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 3. 1(2012): 55–67. Print. Evenson, Brian. “‘Catalog of an Impossible Library’, A Conversation with David B.”. World Literature Today 90. 2(2016): 40–43. Print. Geddes, Jennifer L. “On Evil, Pain, And Beauty: A Conversation With Elaine Scarry”. The Hedgehog Review 2. 2(2000): 78–87. Print. Gilmore, Leigh and Elizabeth Marshall. “Trauma and Young Adult Literature: Representing Adolescence and Knowledge in David Small’s Stitches: A Memoir”. Prose Studies 35. 1(2013): 16–38. doi:10.1080/01440357.2013.781345. Web. Green, Michael J. “Teaching with Comics: A Course for Fourth-Year Medical Students”. Journal of Medical Humanities 34(2013): 471–476. Print. Huyssen, Andreas. Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. Print. Masia, Shawn L. and Orrin Devinsky. “Epilepsy and Behavior: A Brief History”. Epilepsy & Behavior 1(2000): 27–36. Print. Miller, Ann and Murray Pratt. “Transgressive Bodies in the Work of Julie Doucet, Fabrice Neaud and Jean-Christophe Menu: Towards a Theory of the ‘AutobioBD’”. Belphégor 4. 1(2004) no pagination. Pedri, Nancy. “What’s the Matter of Seeing in Graphic Memoir”. South Central Review 32. 3(2015): 8–29. Print. Pratt, Murray. “Dramatizing the Self and the Brother: Auto/biography in David B’s L’Ascension du haut mal”. Australian Journal of French Studies 44. 2(2007): 132–152. Print. Scarry, Elaine. Resisting Representation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Print.

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Smith, Elizabeth Irene. “‘The Body in Pain’: An Interview with Elaine Scarry”. Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 32. 2(2006): 223–237. Print. Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978. Print. Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003. Print. Squier, Susan M. “Literature and Medicine, Future Tense: Making it Graphic”. Literature and Medicine 27. 2(2008): 124–152. Print. Vagnes, Oyvind. “Showing Silence: David Small’s Stitches”. Studies in Comics 1. 2 (2010): 301–313. Print.

5

Multimodal memories: The Photographer: Into War-Torn Afghanistan with Doctors Without Borders by Guibert et al. and Waltz with Bashir by Ari Folman and David Polonsky

Introduction As the preceding chapters have demonstrated, individual and cultural contexts as well as the particular medial channels through which remembrance is reconstructed help shape memory. Memory and narrative share a fluidity of form that contrasts with more rigid discourses around the past that often attend ideas about the modern nation-state, and which frequently privilege conservative values. Through its plasticity, the comics form can support such narratives that do not fit neatly within these frameworks, but rather bear evidence of inconsistencies, gaps, and repetition that helps explore the complications of remembered and experiential narratives. This may be particularly the case with traumatic memory, the presence of which may be paradoxically signified – and ‘encoded’ – through its absence, but also through looping and repetition, among other techniques. This chapter examines the ways that The Photographer: Into War-Torn Afghanistan with Doctors Without Borders (2006) by Emmanuel Guibert, Didier Lefèvre, and Frédéric Lemercier, and Waltz with Bashir (2008) by Ari Folman and David Polonsky, represent traumatic memory, specifically in relation to how the respective texts portray memories of war and conflict via drawn and photographic, and animated registers, respectively. The Photographer retraces Didier Lefèvre’s journey with Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) into Northern Afghanistan in 1986, an expedition that reveals the profound impacts of the Afghan–Soviet War, which lasted from December 1979 to February 1989, on the civilian populations from both sides of the conflict. On the other hand, Waltz with Bashir traces Folman’s journey of discovery as he uses a community of remembrance to support the recovery of his repressed memories about the events leading up to the Sabra and Shatila massacre that took place in Lebanon in 1982. It is worth noting at the outset that the perspectives that the respective works explore are diverse: while The Photographer is narrated from the perspective of a photojournalist accompanying a humanitarian organisation (MSF) into a war zone, Waltz with Bashir is told through the perspective of a former combatant. In the

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analysis, the space between these perspectives generates reflection on the different subject-positions that war and conflict instantiate, particularly considering questions about responsibility, and ethics and the encoding of memory.

The Photographer The Belgian comics publisher Dupuis first published The Photographer as Le Photographe, a title that carries its Barthesian impulse front and centre by drawing the reader’s attention to the function of photography. Originally published in three volumes between 2003 and 2006, the book was awarded the Essentials of Angoulȇme prize in 2007. In 2009, the New York-based publisher, First Second, translated and published the book as a single volume with three sections; Part I describes Didier Lefèvre’s preparation for the trip as he travels from Paris to Karachi, before meeting the MSF team in Peshawar. Part II depicts the mission itself as the MSF team establish a hospital in Zaragandara in Afghanistan and treat the wounded, while Part III details Didier’s harrowing and life-threatening journey back to Pakistan. Alexis Siegel, who translated the text from French to English, offers a luminous introduction to the political history of Afghanistan during the Afghan–Soviet war, the rise of the Taliban – a multi-faceted, rather than monolithic organisation – and Osama bin Laden’s ties with the CIA as well as the Pakistani Secret Service. The introduction helps situate the complex political ecologies of Afghanistan and Pakistan, providing a historical backdrop that would later lead to the events of September 11 2001, as well as contextualising the purpose of Didier’s journey with MSF in 1986. Central to the story is the way that Lefèvre’s story is cleaved with that of the mission, thereby furnishing a story that operates at the interface of the personal and the social – a prime function of documentary. This arrangement harks back to Lustiger-Thaler’s comment about the primacy of the individual as a critical interlocutor that helps shape the meaning of the past in the present, a task which both works foreground through their particular narrative and mode of representation (2013, 915). In this chapter, we observe the representation of memory and its intimate relation with affective time as one of main impulses behind the narratives of both The Photographer and Waltz with Bashir. In documentary comics, a field also described as comics journalism, political, social, and collective pasts constellate personal stories and vice versa. These conjunctions are evident in a broad range of comics such as Spiegelman’s Maus; much of Joe Sacco’s oeuvre such as Journalism (2012), Footnotes in Gaza (2009), The Fixer (2003), Safe Area Goražde (2000), Palestine (1997), as well as his 24-foot panoramic comic, The Great War (2013); Rolling Blackouts (2016) and How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less (2010) by Sarah Glidden; Letting it Go (2013) and We Are on Our Own (2006) by Miriam Katin, among many others including the works that are the subject of this book. Within this field, The Photographer is distinctive because its narrative does not reside wholly within drawn or photographic time, but rather shuttles between the two so that neither form of recollection is privileged, generating

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instead a valuable dialogue between the two modes of recall. The interplay between the two forms creates new aspects in each of them, and in this generates what can be understood as a third-space of signification. Médicins Sans Frontières (MSF) was created on 21 December 1971 by a group of French medical doctors and journalists following the Biafra war of succession in Nigeria. Outraged by the genocide that was unfolding before their eyes, doctors and journalists working for the French government created the organisation in an attempt to bring attention and international support to besieged populations around the world. Bearing witness remains one of MSF’s core principles, so that the organisation acts as a communicative channel in the face of suffering and crises. As stated on its site, When MSF witnesses extreme acts of violence against individuals or groups, the organisation may speak out publicly. We may seek to bring attention to extreme need and unacceptable suffering when access to lifesaving medical care is hindered, when medical facilities come under threat, when crises are neglected, or when the provision of aid is inadequate or abused. (MSF Australia) MSF describes this principle as “témoignage” or testimony as “the act of being willing to speak out about what we see happening in front of us” (MSF Australia). In effect, “témoignage” highlights the work of MSF as an agent “who bears witness”, as well as an organisation who transmits what it means to witness through an act of communication, or “utterance”, to use John Peters’ words (2001, 709).1 The same elements are present in The Photographer, which details one particular mission by MSF into Afghanistan between July and September of 1986. During the Soviet–Afghan War, MSF ran 15 medical programmes and a number of other health campaigns in Afghanistan while the country’s borders were closed. It was for one of these covert missions that Lefèvre joined the MSF team as they entered Afghanistan to provide staff to a hospital that had been set up earlier, and to establish another hospital in Peshawar. Thus, early in the story, the reader is offered a detailed account of the hazards of journeying into the country as the team is smuggled by truck drivers through multiple checkpoints under the cover of night as they travel from Pakistan to Afghanistan. The leader of the mission, Dr Juliette Fournot, asked Lefèvre if he would like to join the team with a specific brief to document the difficulties of providing healthcare in Northern Afghanistan, particularly given the ongoing conflict at the time. Fournot has explained that the Afghan people had a “keen understanding” of the necessity of testimony, and that it was they who requested that a photographer accompany the MSF team to document the impact of the war. In 1986, newspapers considered the region too dangerous to send their reporters and photographers (MSNBC 2009). The text then, acts as a rare document of witnessing of life under siege with its historical specificity filtered through the Lefèvre’s narration.

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Emmanuel Guibert is best known for Alan’s War (2008), a work that also utilises testimony to explore the memories of Alan Cope and his experiences as an American G.I. in World War II. In The Photographer, Guibert’s aesthetic style mimics, in some ways, the harsh conditions under which the story takes place and in Lefèvre’s reconstructed memories of his time in Northern Afghanistan. In keeping with the book’s French origins, the colour scheme is a muted ligne claire, albeit with bolder outlines that embody the sense of danger portrayed within the story. As Guibert explains, the story “is about rough conditions of life in a rough country – the drawings had to be attuned to that” (Wivel 2009, 109), and the drawings convey the sense of urgency on the mission, balanced with a sensitivity to the narrative at stake. While the flat colour scheme invokes associations with Herge’s Tintin, the action encountered in The Photographer suits the harried line work with its documentary nature. Although Herge’s attentiveness to detail in his drawings, such as his drawing of the Qantas plane in the Tintin album Flight 714 to Sydney (1968) may be described as having a documentary ‘likeness’, the fragmented visual nature of The Photographer conveys the intensity of Lefèvre’s personal presence in Afghanistan through a different methodology. With Frédéric Lemercier as colourist and graphic designer, The Photographer is a collaborative work, although focalised primarily through Lefèvre’s voice. Guibert conducted extensive interviews not only with Lefèvre, but also with the original members of the MSF team, asking them to recall their impressions and experiences on the mission that he then used to reconstruct some of the scenes in the book. As Guibert explains, “[t]here’s more direct speech in The Photographer because I interviewed a lot of people in preparing for the book and asked them to play out the dialogues with me, assuming the part of the person they had been 20 years earlier. And I invented a lot of the dialogue in it” (Wivel 2009, 103). As with Waltz with Bashir, a community of remembrance was essential to the construction of narrative in The Photographer, where transcription, reconstruction, and invention describe some of the techniques that Guibert used to shape a seemingly singular narrative trajectory. The active reconstruction and transliteration of the past and its traumatic contents are negotiated in this instance through Didier’s photographs and Guibert’s drawings to develop a coherent narrative. This methodology inherently gestures to the ways in that memory – both individual and collected – are shaped by complex and sometimes contradictory forces. The book’s translated title, The Photographer, immediately emphasises not so much the photographic object, but its human eye – Lefèvre, a photojournalist who, in his lifetime, published only six images of the 4,000 or so photographs he took on this trip. The story revels in its mixed media, or multi-modal, storytelling as it incorporates photographic contact sheets with drawn panels, a combination that raises questions about the narration of testimony and the transmission of traumatic memory in comics journalism. The conjoining of the photographic and illustrated mediums via a documentary framework asks readers to contemplate the relationship between the representation of memory in documentary comics and how witnessing takes place in graphic reportage.

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As Peters suggests, “[w]itnesses serve as the surrogate sense-organs of the absent” (2001, 709), and in the case of the photojournalist, the camera acts as an appendage of witnessing. It was Guibert’s keen interest in Didier’s work as a photographer that led to the production of The Photographer. He and Lefèvre were neighbours growing up, and began frequently lunching together as adults over a two-year period (1998–99) where Guibert would ask Lefèvre to recall his travels with MSF. Lefèvre shared the contact sheets from his travels, and as they pored over these photographic archives, Guibert recorded his friend’s ‘testimony’. He explains, Didier […] trusted me. He gave me all his contact sheets and left me the freedom to choose whatever I wanted. So, I conceived the whole book alone, reading him what I wrote and showing him my choice of pictures very often, always concentrated upon his comments and eager to get as close as possible to what he had lived. That’s also the reason why a 40mm movie made by Juliette Fournot was included in the French edition. (Lorah 2009) Their close communication allowed Guibert to develop Lefèvre’s story, memorialised through their recorded conversations as Lefèvre prematurely died from heart failure at the age of 49 in 2007. Reading the text now, we are placed at a double remove to its inception; not only was it created more than 15 years after the original mission, but Didier and others we meet within its pages have since passed away, as described in the book’s end papers. Juliette Fournot has explained that the book’s hybrid format suits the story of the 1986 medical mission, stating, “[i]t’s very comfortable to be sitting on a shelf between Charlie Brown and the Smurfs. It would’ve been hard to be in a different category of superheroes” (Raz 2009). The photographs or “photo-chemical image” (Adams 2008, 60) and Guibert’s artistry offer alternate articulations of witnessing as they support Lefèvre’s narrative voice as the memories of his trip to Afghanistan were “spurred by the pictures” which “threaded back together the story” (Guibert et al. 2006, 262). Didier’s story then, occupies a broader memorial landscape that stretch ‘beyond’ the photographs themselves, but which the latter help orient. This extends to the co-presence of the photographic contact sheets and drawn strips; as Nina Mickwitz observes, the photographs in the work act as “prompts” rather than presenting “documentary proofs” (2016, 53). A significant feature of The Photographer is the use of contact sheets and drawn panels as co-constitutive elements of the narrative. Kristen Lubben, Executive Director of the Magnum Foundation, describes the multiple functions of the contact sheet as “a record of one’s shooting, a tool for editing, and an index to an archive of negatives” (2011, 9). For Lubben, the contact sheet “embodies much of the appeal of photography itself: the sense of time unfolding, a durable trace of movement through space, an apparent authentication of photography’s claims to transparent representation of reality”. (9) Thus the trace of the past conveyed through the inclusion of selected contact sheets acts as a “site of multiple,

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contingent, and contested meanings” (Mickwitz 2016, 62). The term ‘contact sheet’ itself suggests an enlivening – a point at which the material recording of images in time come alive as they encounter a first expression. They reveal a particular, and historical, sequence of moments, before particular frames are selected for broader release or publication. The unedited contact sheet erodes the sanctity of the selected photograph – what is included may be read very differently depending on its placement within a sequence and what it captures. As Mickwitz argues, contact sheets “also make visible and comment on the multiple selective processes that often have as their outcome one image, culturally encoded as the preserved, transparent, and immediate transfer of a poignant moment in time” (2016, 54). As Henri Cartier-Bresson offers, [a] contact sheet is a little like a psychoanalyst’s casebook. It is also a kind of seismograph that records the moment. Everything is written down – whatever has surprised us, what we’ve caught in flight, what we’ve missed, what has disappeared […] a contact sheet is full of erasures, full of detritus. (quoted in Lubben 2011,18) Cartier-Bresson’s reference to “detritus” may be closely associated with the physical and psychic fall-out from conflict and war, and the role of photojournalism in simultaneously accessing and mediating this scarring through record keeping, testimony, and documentation. To this end, “contact” is made not only through the chemical properties of the photographic act – the light process that marks the film, but also in the way that photographs reside at the interface between the past and the present, gesturing towards the that which has been of the past that so captivated Barthes as he mourned his mother’s death in Camera Lucida (2000 [1980]). This brings to mind not only the perverse incarnation of shadow photographs, such as those portrayed in Tatsumi’s “Hell”, but also the way that photographs (re-drawn or reproduced) brings particular disruptive valences of signification to bear on drawn strips in works such as Persepolis (where Satrapi reproduces photographs of demonstrations taken by her mother), or Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006) by Alison Bechdel. In the latter, a re-drawn ‘centrefold’ photograph of Bechdel’s childhood baby sitter Roy confirms her suspicions about her father’s closeted sexuality, while in Maus, the inclusion of Richieu, a young brother who died before Spiegelman was born, speaks to the ongoing presence of a traumatic loss in the present, confirmed in the book’s closing sequence as Vladek confuses Art for Richieu. These functions of the archive, then, incorporate a blend of practical and narratological aspects that illuminate the archive in both its senses as noun and verb, as a method of storage as well as a mode of reconstructing the past through its traces. The grammar of the contact sheet expands the vocabulary of witnessing as viewers are afforded a more fulsome view of the ‘unedited’ moments that make up a particular duration of the story – though the strips have of course been edited as part of their inclusion. Additionally, what appear to be

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Lefèvre’s markings on the contact sheets with a red grease pencil contribute to an aesthetic of authenticity that supports an intimate relationship between reader and text. Lubben makes a similar point, suggesting that “[g]rease pencil or China marker notations […] indicate personal observations […] one can see how unique these are to each marker, and how the physical trace of the photographer’s hand can be felt on the contact” (2011, 10). Moreover, the cropped contact sheet erodes the documentary-style reliability of photographs – what is included may be read very differently compared with what comes before or after (and which is occluded from memory), and instead offer a testimonial weight closer to that of the drawn sequences. How, then, does the structure of the contact sheet affect how they are read? Guibert has suggested that contact sheets are “morphologically close to a comic strip” (Wivel 2009, 107). While contact sheets and comics are similar in appearance, one may counter that only the former are perhaps closer to a film reel in the way they organise information in a sequentially consistent manner. By contrast, comics embody extreme elision, involving deliberate and carefully planned sequences that selectively reconstruct narrative information for the reader, and which rely intensely on the reader’s contribution to the text to make sense of the action therein. Notwithstanding this distinction, the use of uncropped contact sheets in The Photographer seems to reveal more of the photographer’s hand – there is a vulnerability of sorts that accompanies the exposure of insights into the moments the photographer has chosen to record as this sequencing reveals not only what is captured, but hints at what may have been omitted. The process of reference and exclusion are highlighted through the exposure of the thumbnails that form the images on the contact sheet. While the contact sheets are in black and white, the drawn strips are in colour, and yet the two forms frequently narrate the same events – so while black and white conventionally signify the past, and colour the ‘present’, this distinction is disrupted in The Photographer. Instead, the past is not simply ‘the past’, but continually jostles, interrupts, and demands that the present acknowledge its demands. The text productively disrupts these conventional associations, utilising the tensions as well as synergies between photographic and drawn strips to develop a compelling and complex narrative. The oscillation between the forms generates a third space from their interaction; the reader hovers between them while absorbing both media, and I suggest that this is a highly productive interstitial space that mirrors the multiplicity of remembered forms that constitute the umbrella term ‘memory’. The seemingly incontrovertible proof that a person or scene was once there is a powerful property of photography. The opening pages of The Photographer directly convey the power of the photograph in transmitting the quality of lost time. In one sequence, a scene with a horse-drawn cart is saturated into existence as it is repeated over five panels. The saturation takes place as each contributor to the work is acknowledged, reminding the reader that it is a collaborative effort that has rendered the book into being. This process itself seems to mimic the mnemonic encoding of the past as some memories are repeatedly recalled,

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whereas others fade away under layers of time though not necessarily forgotten altogether. The contact sheet plays a central role in the way that the text remediates the past, not only through Lefèvre’s journey, but also in the way that photographs and illustration equally undertake the work of representing the people and places of Afghanistan. Didier’s photographs include intimate portraits of the people he meets such as Najmuddin and Ahmadjan, as well as the arid, beautiful, and sometimes desolate landscapes that help shape the journey. The book’s English cover immediately conveys dynamism of this relationship; divided into two horizontal sections, the top half contains a drawing of Lefèvre by Emmanuel Guibert, armed so to speak, with his camera. The bottom half contains Lefèvre’s photograph of an Afghan mujahedeen fighter, armed with a gun – an image reproduced in the story proper. As the eye travels between the two images, one recognises the relationship between photographer and subject – except that now, the reader is located in the position of an interlocutor. In both instances, the fourth wall is broken through the gaze of the fighter, as well as the camera’s. The relationship between these two images perfectly anticipates the movement between the two forms as both figures look out to the reader, but also mirror one another. The tension between them is utilised strongly throughout the story, and they alternatively reinforce and contradict one another – what Mickwitz refers to, albeit in a slightly different context, as the productive “splitting” of the position of witness (129). Indeed, the illustrations are frequently used to depict sequences where Lefèvre is unable or hesitant to take photographs, and then the latter form of record is used to reinforce his story. These sequences offer a playful and practical response to Sontag’s assertion that “[t]he person who intervenes cannot record; the person who is recording cannot intervene” (1977, 178). At other times, photographic evidence is used to directly contradict Lefèvre’s narrative voice, sometimes to comic effect. That which is not photographed is rendered through the comics form, and can lead readers to ponder whether the photos undermine the reading of the comic or confirm them as a trace of reality. Switching between these indexical and representational modes of expression means that the text “implicitly interrogates the rhetoric of purity that accompanies not only modes of representation (especially as that rhetoric is conveyed in travel writing and photojournalism) but cultures as well” (Lawson 2014, 327). Indeed, this “rhetoric of purity” is challenged not only in the book’s mechanics but also in its content. Rebecca Scherr makes a similar observation about the way readers utilise a broad range of senses to navigate Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza (2009), stating, “[w]e are addressed not as passive viewers, but as active participants in the gathering and hearing of testimony; our engagement with the material is corporeal, physical, intimate” (2015, 115). In The Photographer, the dialectic the narrative instantiates between drawn strips and photographs highlights the way that memories can be encoded differently, and that each form of engagement contributes to the composition of the story rather than denigrate

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either medium. The combination of photographs and drawings simultaneously undermines the stability of both forms, but also strengthens their narrative capacity by requiring the reader to navigate the tension between both forms of signification. As Michael Rothberg suggests, “[m]emory’s anachronistic quality—its bringing together of now and then, here and there—is actually the source of its powerful creativity, its ability to build new worlds out of the materials of older ones” (2009, 5). The comic portrays traumatic memory through its formal qualities and its refusal to reside within one form of remembrance, instead shuttling back and forth between drawn and photographic sequences. There is a particularly heartrending episode, in which a little boy, Ahmadjan, dies after being wounded in a bombing. Didier accompanies the doctors as they enter a room in which the injured people have been gathered, among them Ahmadjan (always and irrevocably a term of endearment caught in the annals of time). Didier photographs him as he lies next to his family, repeatedly crying out for water “Aoh” (132), a sound that permeates the three panels that contain his photograph. The third photo takes up half a page, and the reader’s eyes meet Ahmadjan’s as he looks into the camera’s lens. Lying beside him, his older sister, her own face bloodied, mirrors the reader’s gaze as she looks at him, her apprehension permanently captured through Didier’s photographic record. Moments later, Didier moves to another room with one of the doctors, John, as he tends to a young girl who has not been able to walk since the bombing. In contrast to the scene with Ahmadjan, this sequence is entirely drawn. Didier explains, “[i]t’s too dark to take pictures. In any case, I don’t feel it” (134). Within the darkened space of the interior, John’s headlamp is the only source of light, and Guibert’s rendition of this scene conveys the brightness of the illumination – picking out the contours of the girl’s figure, and Didier’s glasses in white – in contrast to the silhouettes of the men. John informs him that the girl has been maimed from a tiny piece of shrapnel that has pierced her spinal cord. As noted by one reader, many of the photographs – to which I would add drawn images such as this sequence – convey an affective starkness reminiscent of some of Goya’s scenes in his ‘black paintings’ (1819–23) (Nakapalau 2017). The muted ochre tones of the comic, coupled with the tight framing afforded to many of the sequences, convey despair and outrage, similar to that which viewers also encounter in Goya’s late work. Sitting in the corner, Didier cries silently “to avoid disturbing John” before walking out of the room, upon which he hears someone calling his name, “Ahmadjan!”, before realising that the name also belongs to the little boy whose photograph he had taken a short time earlier. Like Didier, readers may have multiple associations with the name Ahmadjan, from earlier in the text where Juliette asks the Palawan (the group’s guide and champion, or ‘palawan’) to choose a name for Didier after a humorous episode where Didier almost falls off a horse. In the latter, Guibert draws a panel containing a ‘medium shot’ of the Palawan, with a speech balloon containing the name Ahmadjan in Persian (hand lettered by Marjane Satrapi). As discussed in the previous chapter on Persepolis, readers can observe the intimate relationship between humour and

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tragedy in The Photographer, where such ‘small’ humorous moments underscore the devastation of war, but also the resilience of the people trapped in its crosshairs. Lefèvre’s narrative recalls that the Palawan spoke with a “smile and a surprisingly soft voice”, and the reader is asked to observe the designated name in Persian, before it is translated into English in the next panel. As in The Four Immigrants Manga, the representation of language within the speech balloon is meaningful; the effect of this staging is that the reader pauses on the Persian name, even if they are unable to read it, and can almost hear the Palawan’s intonation of an affectionate nickname. The suffix ‘jan’ means dear or beloved, and the name is an “instant hit” (18). When the reader encounters the name again in the figure of the toddler, the diegetic significance of the name is elevated yet again, this time for sorrowful reasons. The contrast between the instances in which the name is invoked produces a range of affective and temporal resonances that the reader can piece together, in their own remembrance of the text. These are moments in time connected not through genealogical time, but rather through an archaeological relation to the text. Thus the reader’s memories of the text are invoked through unearthing or associations that connect otherwise seemingly unconnected moments in the work. Juliette explains that ‘Ahmadjan’s’ mother had requested that she films his death, saying, “Film it, Jamila [Fournot’s Arabic name]. People have to know” (136). The woman’s statement, with her awareness of the significance of testimony, jolts Didier into taking photographs again, and the next sequence consists only of his photographs capturing the transport of the paralysed girl to the MSF clinic. Fournot’s footage of this scene was incorporated into a 40-minute documentary, A Ciel Ouvert [Open Air] released in 2006, and which is available online (Fournot). The documentary, shot in colour, forms another archival form to complement the work of The Photographer. The live action of the film confirms the extraordinary liveliness generated in the movement between photographed and drawn sequences, and which it complements in turn. As Michael North argues, photography was to inspire a new self-consciousness about eyesight and its relationship to phenomena, rather than inspire a new way of seeing (2008, 53). That our way of remembering the past can travel along different narrative pathways, and that the past can be coded in a multiplicity of ways. It is precisely the dynamic attribute of comics, their ability to hold and represent memory in a multiplicity of ways that The Photographer articulates so clearly. As Guibert surmises, “[t]he truth contained in the photographs influences the readings of the drawings, just as the reading of the drawings orientates the comprehension of the photographs. They share their weight of truth, they exchange it” (Wivel 2009, 110). The movement between photograph to drawing is not a seamless transition but it is very valuable because of the very spaces, fissures, and textures that shape this kind of reading – a process that is somehow similar to (or mimics) some mnemonic aspects.

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The text includes many illustrations (and some photographs) of a photograph being taken, to remind the reader that the act of documentation is a selective process, necessarily restricted in the viewpoint that is transmitted in the final selection. As Jeff Adams suggests, “[t]hese methods of memory reconstruction and visualisation are fundamental to the documentary graphic novels as a procedure” (2008, 62). In The Photographer, the comics panels are not simply the connective tissue between the photographic proofs, but contribute to the density of meaning as they are specifically rendered to include or exclude particular details, which varies from scene to scene. A photograph passes – or at least can be seen to stand – for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened. Indeed, the other name for contact sheets, ‘proof’ sheets, speaks to this testimonial impulse. The Photographer offers its readers many insights into photography, and the photographic act but does so in tandem with drawn panels. Early in his journey Didier exhaustedly ponders, “I’m wondering what the hell I’m doing there”, to which he responds, “[a]nd as usual, I answer my question by taking pictures” (37). The text itself distinctly calls attention to the apparatus of photojournalism – in this case a Leica – in a scene set in Peshawar, where Didier meets a journalist from Alsace. In a drawn sequence, Didier recalls that the man is “[a] collector of Leicas”, owning 15 of the cameras. The role of Leica cameras in the modern age of photojournalism is significant. After the successful introduction of the 35mm Leica (Leica I) camera at the Leipzig Spring Fair 1925, photographers would gradually have access to equipment compact enough to support their mobility, with prints (in the form of dry plates and roll film) that were relatively easy to produce, particularly in contrast to the engraving technique that was used by early photojournalists in the 1850s and later. The rise of new optic technologies would have a significant impact on new forms of photojournalism. Photographers such as Eugene Smith, Robert Capa, and others would rise to prominence because of the impact of their work in magazines that gained rapid distribution such as Life, Sports Illustrated, Paris Match, and Picture Post. The access to the kinds of images that would have rarely been seen before led to golden age of photojournalism (1930s to 1960s). Didier describes the Alsatian man as a photographer of “massive resources and unusual methods”. This description is soon validated as he shows Didier footage, “badly filmed, but uncensored”, shot on borrowed cameras by Mujahedeen fighters of the executions of Russian prisoners, which were later returned to him (27). Didier’s later wonders if the man “might also be a Soviet spy”, after considering that “[a]ll the money, logistics, and connections that this [the film footage] must have required leaves me speechless. The images leave me speechless too” (27). This passage accompanies a drawn image of Didier watching a television screen, and anticipates some of the photographic scenes the reader will encounter throughout the work – images that may leave the reader speechless in a similar way to Didier. This sequence illuminates technical aspects of photojournalism through the conversation of the two men, both with regard to the mobility of cameras and videos, and the

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relative ease with which these traumatic images can be transmitted, and there is something ominous about the “collector of Leicas”, but also the way that both men occupy the role of spectator. The Photographer demonstrates its consciousness-raising imperative through the conversations between the characters, figured specifically through the close engagement between doctors and patients. In one sequence, Régis (one of the MSF doctors) informs Didier that [t]he basis of medicine, whether here or in France, is always the same: it’s clinical observation, the study of symptoms. It’s the science of reading signs. And you won’t find a better school for that than practicing medicine in a sanitary wasteland, like what we do here. (124) Doctors and comics readers alike share the “science of reading signs”. For example, in a conversation with Juliette Fournot, the group’s leader, Didier learns that the “chadri”, a long veil worn by women, is an urban phenomenon (in a small village people are related so women don’t need to wear one), and a strategy of movement by providing women greater autonomy and freedom, but also of disguise. The extensive drawn conversation between Juliette and Didier demonstrates Juliette’s ability to connect with Afghani women within private and social settings. Fournot explains that women often carry weapons under the chadri as part of the resistance to the invading USSR army, thereby complicating the signifying range of the garment from a token of dress to an accessory of opposition. In a photographic sequence, Didier captures Juliette and some of the nurses adopting different poses, playfully, while wearing the chadri, which extends the culture of wearing a hijab to these ostensible outsiders. Together with her expertise and comfort as the MSF team leader in negotiating, and managing the team’s journey, Juliette plays a vital role in the mission. The text draws attention to the larger violence of the West in the Soviet– Afghan war. Didier notes that the Alsatian man works for Der Spiegel and Stern, German magazines that were launched within one year of each other (1947, and 1948, respectively), with Der Spiegel particularly influential for its investigative journalism. The process, transmission, and reproduction of photographs in the modern form of photojournalism were to have a profound impact on the cultural imaginary, and on the visualisation of human rights in the twentieth century. The newfound mobility of photography in the twentieth century meant that photojournalism narratives – combining word and images – transmitted stories about people and places around the world that invited their viewers to take part in what seemed a more intimate visual experience. In this way, the camera became a vital accessory to witnessing – as well as an instrument of consumerism and propaganda – and a mechanism for “certifying experience” (Sontag 1977, 177).

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As the caravan travels, they come across many horses that have collapsed from exhaustion with little chance of survival. Robert explains that he cannot stop to inject every horse with morphine to put it out of its misery, but that Didier can “borrow an AK-47 and stick a few bullets into him”. The next panel offers a simple image of Didier taking a photograph, with the caption “Me? But I’ve never shot at anything”. The irony of this statement is revealed in the next panel, which contains Didier’s photograph of the dying horse, before switching to an illustration of Didier walking away from the reader, with the caption, “I point cameras, not guns” (47). The connection between photography and violence is exemplified in a sequence much later in the book as Didier makes a treacherous journey back to Pakistan, with four escorts who are mostly ineffectual and slow moving. One sequence moves from contact sheet to drawn illustration with clear effect. The first image from the contact sheet captures the men as small figures against an arid landscape, and in the next panel Didier’s posture is reminiscent of a sniper. As he holds the camera to his eye he thinks, “Go ahead, guys, take your time”, a line that ostensibly indicates his impatience with the sluggishness of the journey, but which, through the specificity of the illustration, also invokes the gaze of the photographer in the act of shooting his subjects. This surveillance is reminiscent of Sontag’s idea that “[t]here is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera” (1977, 175). The act of photography as a gesture of aggression is invoked several times throughout the work, such as when Didier returns to Paris at the end of the trip and lines “up [his] rolls of film like hunting trophies” (Guibert et al. 2006, 259). Part III describes Didier’s journey back to Peshawar, a sequence that acquires extra meaning as the reader later learns of the personal cost of this and subsequent missions for Lefèvre. While he notes that he has stopped brushing his teeth early on in the sojourn, there is a heart-wrenching episode where he fears for his life as he is effectively abandoned travelling back to Peshawar as he reaches the Arash Pass, where he loses his way in freezing conditions. There is a terrible moment where he hopes to melt snow in his water canister, only to later realise that the canister is vacuum sealed and insulated, so that the snow remains frozen. Eventually, he writes a note to his then-partner Dominique in anticipation of his demise. And in a final act of record, he explains, “I take out one of my cameras. I choose a 20-millimeter lens, a very wide angle, and shoot from the ground,” he says — “to let people know where I died” (219). This image is provided after an extended sequence of only drawn images, depicting Didier’s desperate attempts to stay alive, and implicitly encoding the urgency of the incident through the absence of photographs. The transition from drawn sequence to photograph utilises the significance of using drawings to convey what couldn’t be photographed, as well as the immediacy of taking a photograph at the “decisive moment” to borrow Cartier-Bresson’s phrase – but here, representing the photographer’s vulnerability, rather than that of the subject. Indeed, as Alexandra Schultheis Moore suggests that “[t]he progression in image size and realism of the

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preceding images and poignant text that sets up this photograph enhance its emotional weight and invite the viewer’s direct identification with it” (2013, 99). In this sequence, the distance between the photographer and the event collapses so that the photographs provide an intimate perspective – Didier’s own – on the unfolding event. In this instance, “[p]hotographic spectatorship” (Mickwitz 2016, 120) refers to the photographer as subject, whose absence from the scene speaks of the precarity of his condition and foregrounds his potential demise, and in doing so, allows the reader to identify with Didier. This focalisation is encountered repeatedly throughout the book. For example, one morning Didier exhaustedly awakens, eventually taking a photo of three “Muj” (Mujahedeen) standing in front of him from his makeshift bed. He states, “I know I should take a picture, but I feel so empty. I fumble in my bag and weakly pull out the first camera I feel. Barely frame the picture. There. So be it” (58). The three panels that accompany this narration are all drawn, offering imagined fragments of the photograph Didier takes, and which readers encounter on the next page (59). In the middle of the scene, a toddler looks up at the men, a gesture that seemingly mirrors Didier’s perspective, and a similar sense of unknowingness about what, if anything, is taking place as the three men stand with their backs turned to the camera. The photograph captures a streak of hazy light in its top right hand side, an effect that heightens the impression that the image is Didier’s affective state. Didier describes his act of taking the photograph in a dismissive way, where feeling weak, he “barely” frames the picture. Taken together, these elements indicate the impoverished status of the photographer in the twilight of his waking consciousness. As Nancy Pedri argues, “[m]ore than ever, comics artists are incorporating maps, charts, photographs, sketches, photocopies, or paintings into their cartoon storyworlds” (2015, 1). As well as detailing a specific journey, The Photographer investigates the ways in which personal and history memories are shaped and in ways that are not always reliable, particularly with regard to traumatic events. The exigencies of memory are embedded within the comic’s structure, demonstrating the relationality of memory as something that is emerged and constructed not only through personal archives, but also through active reconstructions of the past through conversations with its survivors. The theme of memory as a relational construct is something that also lies at the heart of Ari Folman and David Polonsky’s Waltz with Bashir (2008), an animated documentary about the recollection of buried and repressed memories via a memory community.

Waltz with Bashir In The Photographer, readers are immersed into a story-world where drawn images and photographic strips perform the work of narration through their co-mixing. By contrast, in both the film and comics adaptation of Waltz with Bashir (2008 and 2009, respectively), drawn images occupy the central storytelling role, with a break to live footage and photographs, respectively, only

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made in each text’s concluding sequence. The central ‘protagonist’, Ari Folman, directed the film and illustrator David Polonsky provided the images for both the film and the comic. Four years in the making, the film’s animation is based on live-action video footage that was then used as a source material for the animation images that were “crafted frame by frame using drawings and vector-based computer technology” (“Waltz with Bashir Press Kit” 4–6 quoted in Kraemer 2008, 61). The story focuses on Ari’s absence of memory from his time as a soldier in the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) in 1982. He finds his inability to recall portions of his service particularly distressing around events associated with the Sabra neighbourhood and Shatila refugee camp massacre, which took place in West Beirut, Lebanon, between 15 and 18 September 1982, during which time it is estimated that up to 3,500 civilians were killed over the course of the three days. The massacre was carried out by the Kataeb Party, also known as the Lebanese Phalanges Party, in retaliation for the assassination of the Phalange leader Bashir Gemeyal, for which Palestinian militants were blamed. Annabelle Roe notes that “[h]istorically, documentary makers have utilised animation to illustrate, clarify, visualise and emphasise, using animation to make up for the shortcomings of live-action material” (2013, 12), and that “[t] he absence of indexical images speaks to the absences in knowledge and memory” (168). In Waltz with Bashir, animation is used to re-construct memories of war in a visually emphatic mode that conveys the tension and strain under which the soldiers operated. The film has been described as “hallucinatory”, taking some of its visual cues from Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), a spectacular film about the existential disorientation of war as its heart of darkness reveals its omnipresence instead of being safely housed in a discrete locus. The film’s aesthetic style accords with Folman’s description that “[w]ar is like a really bad acid trip” and that the use of animation was the “only way” to portray the “memories, hallucinations [and] dreams” that made up that experience (Freedland 2008). While Shohini Chaudhuri suggests that animation is used as “a distancing device” (2014, 152), Landesman and Bendor argue that the film produces a “synthetic” yet “rich, consistent, and thus trustworthy sense of reality for its viewers, not despite but because of its unique aesthetic choices – its innovative animation techniques and mixing of reality with fantasy” (2011, 354). Indeed, Joseph Kraemer draws a direct link between McCay’s The Sinking of the Lusitania with Waltz with Bashir as part of ongoing debates on trauma and documentary representation across mixed-media (59). The discussion on The Photographer demonstrated an instance where the drawn and photographic registers complement and enhance the signifying elements of the other. That is, drawn images may also be used strategically to underscore meaning in an indexical representation, and vice versa. For example, in the feature film The Tracker (2002), the diegesis of the live-action film strategically cuts to paintings (drawn specifically for the film by South Australian artist Peter Coad) to avoid the direct representation of the murder of Aboriginal Australians. While the paintings offer a direct approximation of

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the violence, they also provide a screen memory that rests ‘on top’ of the filmic register. The soundtrack aids the viewer stitch the filmic and drawn referents together by continuing across the cut to the latter. The film thereby avoids depicting historical murders and their re-enactment, given the historical and ongoing trauma of colonisation for Aboriginal peoples in Australia. The static image of Coad’s paintings also tends to the way in which traumatic events may be re-experienced as though frozen in time, with particular elements or fragments that galvanise the recollection. Film critic Paul Byrnes notes that “each killing becomes a kind of instant history” such that “the paintings could be from any time, representing a collective memory” (Australian Screen). While the modes of representation in The Tracker are clearly differentiated, the visual style in Waltz with Bashir is fairly close to its indexical counterpart – much like the drawn strips in The Photographer. This supports the film’s status as an animated documentary, which introduces each character’s name in both English and Hebrew, to confirm its status as a text designed for audiences within and outside of Israel. The film’s soundtrack plays a significant role in the representation of memory as well as duration. The German composer Max Richter wrote an original score for the film, one portion of which resembles the second movement of Bach’s Italian Concerto. This haunting track is used to portray a scene from 1982 where the soldiers – including Ari and the troop leader Frenkel – encounter a young boy holding an RPG (rocket propelled grenade). The stately pace of the music blankets the scene from which only occasional sounds emerge, such as the sound of the exploding tank, and the sound of rifles firing as the soldiers shoot the boy. The soldiers move slowly, which, coupled with the music and the gentle light filtering in among the vegetation, lends the scene a perversely meditative mood. This sequence is interrupted briefly by the sound of Frenkel’s voice which enters to explain, “[s] omeone shouted ‘Frenkel!’”. The scene cuts to Frenkel as he speaks to Ari in the present, and this action reinforces the significance of the call by disrupting the dream-like state into which the viewer may be lulled. Frenkel continues, “I saw a boy holding an RPG” and the scene returns to the flashback, as a boy stands directly towards the camera aiming an RPG. The camera cuts to a reverse shot as all the soldiers begin firing. Their action en masse reinforces the terrible cost of human life as the camera zooms out from the boy’s bloodied body. The extended sense of duration speaks of the way that traumatic memories can find themselves expressed through temporal dislocation, in which the past either seems to move too fast or too slowly.2 The film reflexively draws attention to the contingent and mutable status of memories tied to traumatic events such as war. The opening sequence depicts Ari meeting Boaz Rein-Buskila, with whom he served in the IDF, in a bar. As they converse, Boaz recounts a nightmare from which he has been suffering repeatedly; 26 dogs crowd outside his place of work, and he knows that they have “come to kill”. They issue an order to Boaz’s boss; “[g]ive us Boaz Rein or we’ll eat your customers. In one minute”. Boaz is certain that the dream relates to Lebanon, which Israel invaded to expel the Palestinian Liberation

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Organization (PLO) during the 1982 Lebanon War. Considered too sensitive to shoot people, Boaz’s unit instructed him to “liquidate” dogs instead – to silence their warning barks as the soldiers entered villages to look for “wanted” Palestinians. He explains that he remembers each of the dogs he shot – 26 in total, although the nightmares started only 20 years after the event. During their conversation, Boaz asks Ari whether films can be therapeutic, to which he replies that he’s never dealt with “anything like this” in his films. Boaz’s question refers to Folman’s background in filmmaking; prior to Waltz with Bashir, he made several army information films as part of his military service, in his words, “[h]ow to defend yourself from atomic attack, stuff like that” (quoted in Freedland 2008). Boaz then asks Ari whether he has any flashbacks to “Beirut, Sabra and Shatila”. In response to Ari’s negative, Boaz informs Ari, “you were only 100 yards away from the massacre!”, to which Ari responds, “more like 200 or 300 yards. The truth is that it’s not stored in my system”. Ari’s claim that the massacre is not “stored” in his system belies the specificity with which he ‘corrects’ Boaz’s statement about the unit’s distance from the massacre. Metaphorically, the greater distance in Ari’s mind between the unit and the massacre mimics the remoteness of his memories from the event. As the men converse, the bar’s interior is depicted in darkened tones, with pictures and images on the walls mostly indistinct (with the exception of a framed image of Bob Dylan), while rain falls outside. In one frame, a man sitting at the bar behind Ari looks directly at the ‘camera’, a perspective that the film cuts for a second time soon after. While this shot is held for only 4 seconds in total, the unknown character’s gaze towards, and then turn away from the camera, mimics the search for memory as something that may be partial, interrupted, or temporary. Through the various elements of the miseen-scène, the opening scene enhances the sense that the past is only partially accessible, if at all. The opening scene thus establishes some of the slippages evident not only in traumatic memory, but episodic memory more generally. Nina Mickwitz makes a similar observation about the representation of memory in the film as “saturated […] and slippery, refusing to be grasped or fully held to account as it continually shifts, moves, and contorts” (2016, 81). As an elastic phenomenon, memory is variable, capable of being stretched, twisted and erased – and may demonstrate some of these characteristics within a hair’s breadth, as evident in the conversation between Ari and Boaz. In Folman’s own words, “[i]t’s not that I had total amnesia about it […] but I had worked very hard to repress those memories. I had the basic storyline, but there were large holes” (quoted in Freedland 2008). One can readily identify the function of repressed memories in response to the trauma of the Lebanon War and the Sabra and Shatila massacre. In response to the devastating impact of World War I, Freud refined his theory of trauma in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1922) by analysing symptoms expressed by ‘shell-shocked’ soldiers returning from the front. Freud found that shocks of this kind were also apparent in non-military sufferers who had

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survived accidents that posed a sudden “risk to life” (12). In this work he identified psychic trauma as a mechanism that disturbs the individual’s relation to time. Commenting on Freud’s formulation of trauma, Cathy Caruth explains that “[w]hat causes trauma, then, is a shock that appears to work very much like a threat to the body’s spatial integrity, but is in fact a break in the mind’s experience of time” (1993, 25). Breaks in linear temporality, then, are one hallmark of traumatised time and each of respective narratives under examination, evoke – by different means – this conception of traumatised, fissured time, where the past and present bear painfully upon each other. After hearing about Boaz’s dream, Ari wonders why he does not remember their time in Lebanon, the absence of which provokes him to embark on an inquiry into this particular past. Indeed, on his drive home, Ari experiences his first flashback of the massacre, which he accesses obliquely in a dream-like sequence. He and two fellow soldiers emerge naked, but armed, from a sea, as orange flares burst in the night sky over shelled apartments. The flashback concludes with a drawn reference to the grieving women who are visible in the video footage at the end of the film, whose figures haunt the film proleptically. Early the next morning, Ari visits a friend, Ori Sivan – a therapist – to ask why hearing about Boaz’s nightmare triggered Ari’s flashback, particularly because he believes that Boaz’s dream has “nothing to do with [Ari]”. In response, Ori explains a memory experiment in which participants created a false memory from their childhood after viewing a doctored photograph. He goes on to offer several missives about the workings of memory; first, that given its dynamic nature, “memory fills the holes [what is “missing”] with things that never happened”, but also that memory “takes us where we need to go”.3 During this exchange, the diegetic background includes ‘fictional’ elements such as a Ferris wheel and hot air balloon, as a meta-commentary for viewers to reflect on what they see (and fail to see) in the film itself. Much like Ari’s conversation with Boaz, Ori’s statements point to the complexities of memory. At this juncture, it is worthwhile noting that the act of forgetting plays a vital role in reducing the world and its ever-present inputs to a manageable quantum. Both Nietzsche and Freud observed the necessity of forgetting; Nietzsche commenting on “the use of active forgetfulness, like some porter at the door, a maintainer of psychic order, quiet, and etiquette” as a necessary form of psychic evacuation (2006, 35), while Freud surmised that forgetting “in all cases is proved to be founded on a motive of displeasure” (Psychopathology 1914, 138). Thus, mnemic capacity – which relates to the ability to retain memory – is not always desirable, particularly if it threatens the integrity of the subject. It is only through conversations, the exchange of words and of half-remembered and consciously constructed images that Ari begins to piece together his impressions of that time. The film privileges a community of memory that performs an integral function for individual recollection, a move that raises questions about the construction of memory, and the gaps, aporia, and evasions that can consciously and unconsciously shape its re-construction.

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Ari next visits Carmi Cna’an in Holland, as the latter was a soldier in the same unit as Ari and features in his flashback. On their drive to Carmi’s estate, the latter tells Ari that his young son has recently started asking him questions about his time as a soldier, and specifically whether “he ever shot anyone”. Ari poses this question to Carmi again, and the latter responds, “I don’t know”. As they walk towards the house, Ari asks his friend whether he can draw pictures of Carmi and his son, to which Carmi replies, “[d]raw as much as you like, but don’t film”. Carmi’s request maintains the division between drawn and photographic registers to retain the anonymity of Carmi and that of his son. It is worth noting, as Chaudhuri does, the characters Boaz and Carmi represent subjects who “agreed to participate [in the film] only on condition that their identities were concealed”, their voices dubbed by actors (2014, 151). As Astrid Erll writes in relation to socio-cultural contexts, “[o]ur memories are often triggered as well as shaped by external factors ranging from conversations among friends to books and places” (Erll and Nünning 2010, 5). Folman’s story emphasises the ways in which individual cultural memories are influenced by their socio-cultural contexts, and the viewer is ushered into a community of tenuous remembrance, where the text troubles what it means to remember and forget. Folman himself attests in the film that he and his fellow soldiers “had no clue what was going on: we didn’t know there was a massacre” (quoted in Freedman); a statement that echoes the disavowal of the knowledge regarding the transportation of Jews and other prisoners to the death camps in World War II. In Gil Hochberg’s reading, the film is not about the “recovery of memory, but about the persistence of forgetting; it is not simply about the personal forgetting that results from post-combat stress disorder, but more precisely concerns collective amnesia” (2013, 52). At his second meeting with Ori, the latter offers an interpretation of Ari’s flashback, saying, “[y]our interest in the massacre stems from another massacre. Your interest in those camps [Sabra and Shatila] is actually about the ‘other’ camps.” Here, the viewer learns that Ari’s parents are survivors of the camps in Auschwitz, so that, in Ori’s reading of Ari’s amnesia, the later event accesses the trauma of the first. He encourages Ari to “seek out people” concerning the events of the Sabra and Shatila massacre to help him find out “what really happened”. Contrary to his friend’s suggestion, the film does not seek to establish “what really happened”, even if such a thing were possible to reconstruct through an animated documentary. Instead the film maintains an affective distance between the soldiers, their memories of the war, and the events of the massacre As Kamran Rastegar suggests, “[i]n casting the relationship between Israel and the Phalange as a ‘waltz’ (however ironically), Folman’s title figures it as a politely disengaged proximity, a fleeting whirl that does not imply any more intimate or sustained involvement” (2013, 70). The latter statement does not apply equally, however, to all the individuals portrayed in the film, such as the journalist Ron Ben-Yishai, who was the first journalist to cover the massacre. In his recollections, Ben-Yishai states that

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after learning about the massacre he phoned the then-Israeli Minister for Defense, Ariel (Arik) Sharon, to let him know what was happening; “[t]hey’re slaughtering Palestinians. We have to put a stop to it”. He also recalls Sharon’s response, “‘Thanks for bringing it to my attention’ […] Well, something along those lines”. In these words, viewers can hear Ben-Yishai’s consternation in confronting the deliberate disavowal of the massacre by Sharon. The Kahan Commission, established in Israel in September 1982 to investigate the massacre, found Sharon responsible for “ignoring the danger of bloodshed and revenge when he approved the entry of the Phalangists into the camps as well as not taking appropriate measures to prevent bloodshed” (MFA). While Sharon eventually resigned – under duress – from his position as Minister, he would later become Prime Minister of Israel from 2001 until 2006. Robert Dillon, US ambassador to Lebanon from 1981 to 1983 has spoken on the events immediately preceding the massacre, stating, “[t]he Israelis surrounded Sabra, cut it off completely. They mounted searchlights from buildings nearby to illuminate Sabra and Shatila”. This information offers a useful counterpart to the memory-journey on which Folman embarks as it accords with the partial memories he uncovers – that he and his fellow soldiers launched flares from rooftops that allowed the Phalangists, a Lebanese Christian militia group, to enter the camps and carry out the massacre. Towards the end of the film, Ari meets again with his friend Ori, and exclaims, “[i]t’s amazing. A massacre took place, it was carried out by Christian Phalangists. All around were several circles of our soldiers. Every circle had some information…[but]… the penny didn’t drop. They didn’t realize they were witnessing a genocide”. Ari remembers being in the “second or third” circle and wonders, “Does it make any difference if I fired them or if I just saw the flares that helped people shoot others?” Here, Ori invokes the traumatic re-emergence of Ari’s past in his inability to remember the massacre, suggesting that Ari conflated the “murderers” – the Phalangists – with the action of the Israeli soldiers. Ori continues that the reason for doing so is because Ari’s guilt as the child of Holocaust survivors meant that he “unwillingly […] took on the role of Nazi”. This suggestion is left unanswered, the response to Ari’s question offering a strategy by which his personal culpability is effectively avoided. The proximal blindness of the soldiers to what they were involved in continues to haunt their memories, each of which is marked by gaps and aporia. The question “how do I know?” is repeated throughout the film by various characters such as Carmi and Frenkel, and while in the first instance, the response can be understood as a defensive response to Ari’s questions, they also hint at a deeper confusion (and reluctance to wonder) about the ethics of wartime aggression and personal culpability. The switch from animation to video footage at the end of the film is signalled through the introduction of grief-stricken wails and Arabic dialogue, which remain untranslated. This soundtrack connects the animated diegesis of the film – as the camera zooms onto Ari’s darting eyes and rising chest – to the footage from which the soundtrack is derived. The reverse shot then presents the viewer with the

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haunting images of the bloodied victims of the massacre, accompanied by the heart-rending presence of those who grieve for them. As Rastegar notes, one woman looks directly into the camera and cries out ‘Sawwaru, sawwaru, sawwaru, waynkum?’ While this literally translates as ‘Film, film, film, where were you?,’ a more contextual translation for her call would be: ‘Film this all you want, but where were you when it happened? Significantly, the film does not subtitle the Arabic spoken by the woman; she uses the plural imperative, demanding that the videographer(s) shoot, photograph, document, but also confronts them as well as the audience member as if to ask why the world was not able to prevent the event from occurring. (2013, 72–73) It is unclear why Folman chose not to translate the woman’s words, particularly given their address to the camera. The viewer can discern the same consciousness for the need to witness, as well as a demand to explain how this tragedy could have taken place, as is evident in The Photographer, as well as in other works of comics journalism such as Sacco’s Palestine (2003). Unlike these works, in Waltz with Bashir, the voices of individuals – civilians – directly impacted by war remain partially hidden, understandable only to viewers who speak Arabic. Even in the absence of translation, however, the woman’s despair is plain to see. Folman conjoins Ari to the scene of the massacre, which is suggestive of a sense of guilt for its unfolding. In Folman’s words, he wanted to change the coding of the visual register from representational (animation) to the indexical (video) to emphasise that “behind those beautiful drawings and animation, there were real people, they were slaughtered, they were killed […] there were thousands of people there” (France24 2008). In this context, the words of Robert Fisk (2012), a Middle East correspondent who attended the immediate aftermath of the massacre, make sense, “doesn’t Lebanon bear responsibility with the Phalangist Lebanese, Israel with the Israeli army, the West with its Israeli ally, the Arabs with their American ally?” The import of Fisk’s questions is in the way that he draws connections between so-called enemies and allies so that each of them is complicit in the massacre in some way. Ari does not occupy the role of the Nazi, nor is he entirely a victim; but rather something closer to the position of perpetrator-bystander, with its complicated ethical valences.

Conclusion Writing on the role of photography in shaping memories of conflict, Susan Sontag argued in 2004 that “[t]he Western memory museum is now mostly a visual one” (“Regarding the Torture of Others”). As explored in this chapter, memories can be visually encoded along diverse registers of meaning such as photographic, drawn, and animated forms of remembrance. This chapter has analysed the possibilities of comics and animated documentary in relaying

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events of the past in through visual strategies that speak to the multidimensionality of memory and its reconstruction. Where The Photographer is visualised through the perspective of third-parties to the conflict – jointly MSF and Didier Lefèvre, Waltz with Bashir is focalised through the narrator’s excavation of memories from the Lebanon War. Each work presents, differently, the audacity of memory in rendering the past within the present, as well as foregrounding the potentialities and limitations posed by each form of visual register. Perhaps more uniquely, both texts utilise a combination of mediums to unsettle their readers, and viewers, prompting them to consider how each channel shapes the representation of memory. This strategy speaks to the enormity of what it means to unearth traumatic memories, where the refusal, or inability, to remain within a single signifying framework mimics the ongoing displacement of war and conflict on all those who are caught in its path. The next, and final, chapter explores two online comics, “At Work Inside Our Detention Centres: A Guard’s Story” and “Villawood”, that explores the impact of indefinite detention on human life within an Australian context, and how memories and communities of resilience are generated from within the ‘exclusion zone’.

Notes 1 For a detailed discussion of the concept of ‘témoignage’, see “Témoignage and Responsibility in Photo/Graphic Narratives of Médecins Sans Frontières” (2013) by Alexandra Schultheis Moore. 2 On the subject of representing duration, see note 6 of Chapter 4. 3 The dialogue in the film and comics differs slightly. In this discussion, I refer to the former, but the differences between the two are worth noting.

Bibliography Adams, Jeff. Documentary Graphic Novels and Social Realism. Oxford and New York: Peter Lang, 2008. Print. Australian Screen. “The Tracker: Curator’s Notes”. Paul Byrne. n.d. https://aso.gov.au. Accessed 22 January 2019. Web. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans. Richard Howard. London: Vintage Books, 2000 [1980]. Print. Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. London: Jonathan Cape, 2006. Print. Caruth, Cathy. “Violence and Time: Traumatic Survivals”. Assemblage 20(1993): 24–25. Print. Chaudhuri, Shohini. Cinema of the Dark Side: Atrocity and the Ethics of Film Spectatorship. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014. Print. Dillon, Robert. “Moments in U.S. Diplomatic History: The Sabra and Shatila Massacre”. Association for Diplomatic Studies & Training. https://adst.org/2015/09/ the-sabra-and-shatila-massacre/. Accessed 24 May 2018. Web. Erll, Astrid and Ansgar Nünning (eds). Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co., 2010. Print.

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Fisk, Robert. “The Forgotten Massacre”. The Independent. 14 September 2012. http s://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/the-forgotten-massacre-8139930. html. Accessed 24 May 2018. Web. Fournot, Juliette. A Ciel Ouvert (2006). https://blog.archivevalley.com/2017/04/12/the-r ight-footage-a-journey-into-war-torn-afghanistan-when-didier-lefevre-and-emma nuel-guibert-transcend-the-boundaries-of-the-graphic-novel/. Accessed 23 February 2018. Web. France24. “Ari Folman Presents his Film Waltz with Bashir”. Online video clip. YouTube. 16 May 2008. Accessed 18 June 2018. Web. Freedland, Jonathan. “Lest We Forget”. The Guardian. 25 October 2008. https://www. theguardian.com/film/2008/oct/25/waltz-with-bashir-ari-folman. Accessed 26 May 2018. Web. Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans. and ed. James Strachey. Vol.19. London: Hogarth, 1961 [1922]. 24 vols. Print. Freud, Sigmund. The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. New York: The MacMillan Company, 1914. Print. Guibert, Emmanuel, Didier Lefèvre and Frédéric Lemercier. The Photographer: Into War-Torn Afghanistan with Doctors Without Borders. New York: First Second Books, 2009. Print. Guibert, Emmanuel, Didier Lefèvre and Frédéric Lemercie. Le Photographe. 3 volumes. Brussels: Aire Libre Depuis, 2003–2006. Print. Hochberg, Gil. “Soldiers as Filmmakers: On the Prospect of ‘Shooting War’ and the Question of Ethical Spectatorship”. Screen 54. 1(2013): 44–61. Print. Kraemer, Joseph A. “Waltz with Bashir (2008): Trauma and Representation in the Animated Documentary”. Journal of Film and Video 67. 3–4(2015): 57–68. Print. Landesman, Ohad and Roy Bendor. “Animated Recollection and Spectatorial Experience in Waltz with Bashir”. Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal 6. 3 (2011): 353–370. Print. Lawson, Daniel. “The Rhetorical Work of Remediation in The Photographer”. Studies in Comics 5. 2(2014): 319–336. Print. Lorah, Michael C. “Documenting Afghanistan: Guibert on The Photographer”. 23 March 2009. newsarama.com. Accessed 30 May 2017. Web. Lubben, Kristen (ed.). Magnum Contact Sheets. London: Thames & Hudson Ltd, 2011. Print. Lustiger-Thaler, Henri. “Memory Redux”. Current Sociology Review 61. 5–6(2013): 906–927. Print. MFA (Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs). “104: Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Events at the Refugee Camps in Beirut – 8 February 1983”. www.gov.mfa. il. Accessed 3 July 2018. Web. Mickwitz, Nina. Documentary Comics: Graphic Truth-Telling in a Sceptical Age. New York: Palgrave Macmillan US, 2016. Print. MSF Australia. “Advocating and Témoignage”. www.msf.org.au/advocacy-and-t% C3%A9moignage. Accessed 23 February 2018. Web. MSNBC. “The Photographer on ‘The Rachel Maddow Show’ on MSNBC”. 12 June 2009. www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSK_zN-Ne8Y. Accessed 30 May 2017. Web. Nakapalau, Jonathan. “‘The Photographer’ [Review]”. Goodreads. 17 October 2017. goodreads.com. Accessed 13 June 2018. Web.

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Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morality. Trans. Carol Diethe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Print. North, Michael. Camera Works. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Print. Pedri, Nancy. “Thinking about Photography in Comics”. Image & Narrative 16. 2 (2015): 1–13. Print. Peters, John Durham. “Witnessing”. Media, Culture & Society 23(2001): 707–723. Print. Rastegar, Kamran. “‘Sawwaru Waynkum?’ Human Rights and Social Trauma in Waltz with Bashir”. College Literature 40. 3(2013): 60–80. Print. Raz, Guy. “Illustrator Fills in Photographer’s Tale of War”. All Things Considered [Interview with Guibert]. 27 June 2009. npr.org. Accessed 30 May 2017. Web. Roe, Annabell Honess. Animated Documentary. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Print. Rothberg, Michael. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009. Print. Sacco, Joe. Palestine. London: Jonathan Cape, 2003. Print. Scherr, Rebecca. “Framing Human Rights: Comics Form and the Politics of Recognition in Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza”. Textual Practice 29. 1(2015): 111–131. Print. Schultheis Moore, Alexandra. “Témoignage and Responsibility in Photo/Graphic Narratives of Médecins Sans Frontières”. Journal of Human Rights 12. 1(2013): 87–102, doi:10.1080/14754835.2013.754295. Sontag, Susan. On Photography. London: Penguin Books, 1977. Print. Sontag, Susan. “Regarding the Torture of Others”. The New York Times Magazine. 23 May 2004. Web. The Tracker. Dir. Rolf de Heer. Perf. David Gulpulil, Gary Sweet. Fandango/The Globe Group. 2002. DVD. Wivel, Matthias. “The Emmanuel Guibert Interview”. The Comics Journal 297(2009): 94–114. Print.

Further reading Cook, Roy T. “Drawings of Photographs in Comics”. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 70. 1. Special Issue: The Media of Photography (2012): 129–138. Print. Costello, Diarmuid and Dominic McIver Lopes. “Introduction”. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 70. 1. Special Issue: The Media of Photography (2012): 1–8. Print. El Refaie, Elisabeth. “Subjective Time in David B.’s Graphic Memoir Epileptic”. Studies in Comics 1. 2(2010): 281–299. Print. Fisk, Robert. “Whether Armenia, the Nazis or Isis – If You’re Going to Commit Genocide, You Can’t Do It Without the Help of Local People”. The Independent. 24 May 2018. https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/armenia-genocide-nazi-germa ny-poland-isis-looting-war-a8367071.html. Accessed 24 May 2018. Web. Glidden, Sarah. How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less. New York: Vertigo/DC Comics, 2010. Print. Glidden, Sarah. Rolling Blackouts: Dispatches from Turkey, Syria and Iraq. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly Publications, 2016. Print. Gomez Romero, Luis and Dahlman, Ian. “Introduction – Justice Framed: Law in Comics and Graphic Novels”. Law Text Culture 16(2012): 3–32. Print. Guibert, Emmanuel. Alan’s War. New York: First Second, 2008. Print.

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Honeyman, Susan. “Pain Proxies, Migraine and Invisible Disability in Renee French’s H Day”. Studies in Comics 5. 2(2014): 293–318. Print. Kara, Selmin and Camilla MohringReestorff. “Introduction: Unruly Documentary Artivism”. Studies in Documentary Film 9. 1(2015): 1–9. Print. Katin, Miriam. Letting it Go. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly Publications, 2013. Print. Katin, Miriam. We Are on Our Own. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly Publications, 2006. Print. Postema, Barbara. “Establishing Relations: Photography in Wordless Comics”. Image [&] Narrative 16. 2(2015): 84–95. Print. Sacco, Joe. Footnotes in Gaza. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2009. Print. Sacco, Joe. Journalism. New York: Random House, 2012. Print. Sacco, Joe. The Fixer: A Story from Sarajevo. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly Publications, 2003. Print. Sacco, Joe. The Great War. London: Jonathan Cape, 2013. Print. Sacco, Joe. Safe Area Goražde: The War in Eastern Europe 1992–95, 2000. Print. Spiegelman, Art. The Complete Maus. London: Penguin Books, 2003. Print. Viljoen, Jeanne-Marie. “Waltz with Bashir: Between Representation and Experience”. Critical Arts 28. 1(2014): 40–50. Print. Wolk, Douglas. “Book Review: ‘The Photographer’ by Emmanuel Guibert, Didier Lefèvre and Frédéric Lemercier”. Washington Post. 31 May 2009. washingtonpost. com. Accessed 14 May 2017. Web. Yosef, Raz. “War Fantasies: Memory, Trauma and Ethics in Ari Folman’s Waltz With Bashir”. Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 9. 3(2010): 311–326. Print. YouTube. Doctors Without Borders/MSF–USA. “The Photographer Gallery Talk”. VII Gallery, New York. Accessed 30 May 2017. Web.

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Comics online: Memories from the exclusion zone in “At Work Inside Our Detention Centres: A Guard’s Story” by Wallman et al. and “Villawood” by Safdar Ahmed

Introduction The theme of detention, explored in Chapter 1, reappears with equal urgency in “At Work Inside Our Detention Centres: A Guard’s Story” (“A Guard’s Story”) (2014) by Sam Wallman (artist), Pat Grant (producer), Pat Armstrong (designer) and Nick Olle (journalist), and in “Villawood” (2015) by Safdar Ahmed, both short-form documentary comics found online. These comics resuscitate memories of detention and brings the discussion full circle back to the opening analysis of The Four Immigrants Manga and The Arrival. In an era of impulse driven consumption, comics usefully intervene in everyday reading practices because they encourage us to take time to create meaning, thereby stimulating the kind of counter-cultural thinking associated with experimental or exploratory literature. In contrast to the sound bites and visual ‘flashes’ that constitute much of our engagement with news and online media, many digital graphic narratives exploit the online format to subvert, rather than support, common reading practices. Much like their paper counterparts, online comics frequently require the reader to lengthen their reading time and concentration to comprehend the bi-ocular messages before them. As noted in this book’s opening chapter, the use of panels helps shape the process of meaning making as the iconographic value of both words and images are combined to create meaning. So, for example, an elongated panel can function in a similar way to an establishing shot in film, inviting the reader to absorb the setting and details of a scene, whereas a narrow panel may act as a brief incision of information, perhaps conveying shock, excitement or any number of experiences one may associate with rapidity. Such an effect may also be achieved through the use of consistent panel dimensions, but where their contents are arranged in such a way as to suggest a dynamic fracturing of time. The formal structure of each comic supports readers’ navigation of the text in relation to the pace, pulse, and speed of reading. As Nina Mickwitz argues, “documentary webcomics are a part of ‘practices at the edge of journalism, where the struggles for that symbolic power and for alternative modes of knowing become visible’” (Matheson 446, quoted in Mickwitz 2016, 146). Over time, this documentary format has become more popular, perhaps best known in relation to Joe Sacco’s oeuvre.

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In both “A Guard’s Story” and “Villawood”, readers can observe the emergence of “alternative modes of knowing” as the stories remediate the lived experiences of individuals within the sphere of detention – both guard and detainee – and this is evident in the respective stories’ content and modes of transmission. Readers must scroll vertically to navigate the text through which the story gradually emerges. The physical act of scrolling can be regarded as the digital counterpart to turning the page in a print novel, and the scroll ‘up’ or ‘down’ resembles flipping back and forth between the pages of a book. Here, ‘scrolling’ takes on both material and digital dimensions; that is, by navigating the text the reader also unfurls the digital scroll of the text. The intimate relationship between the two modalities of the term draws attention to the way in which textual meaning is shaped not only through the text’s content but also its presentation in space and time within the hyperframe of the screen.1 This style of navigation also seems apt for the way that asylum seekers are moved away from and increasingly off Australian shores. As the editors of the Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature state, by ‘unrepressing’ questions about literature, its limits and possibilities, “[e]xperimentation makes alternatives visible and conceivable” (2012, 1). In the case of “A Guard’s Story” and “Villawood”, scrolling imitates a descent into forgotten memories – personal and cultural – as it unravels repressed, or hitherto unknown, memories about the treatment of asylum seekers in Australia. As an analogue to a physical descent, the reader can use the mouse to pause at or skim over different parts of the text, as well as reencountering them by scrolling ‘up’. The narrative thereby takes advantage of its presence online to map its representation of traumatised subjects through the very structure of the story. This is, I suggest, also connected to the predominance of white space in both texts, as readers encounter scenes that partially emerge from its opacity. The reader is brought to bear witness to scenes that would otherwise remain ignored in a broader cultural context, similar to the scenes that unfold in The Photographer. In this regard, Mickwitz suggests, “it is precisely because they contrast with the registers and established conventions of factual genres and discourses that [online] comics assume added value in terms of credibility and authenticity” (2016, 147). This chapter explores the visual strategies and techniques utilised in both texts to establish the documentary value of recording lived experiences and memories of detention, and the recognition of the subject within extra-juridical settings. As discussed in the preceding chapters, white space can represent anxieties of deletion (such as in Persepolis) or help convey an overwhelming affective setting (such as in Stitches) in presenting episodic memory. In “A Guard’s Story” and “Villawood”, white space can be regarded as a sea of implicit memories – unconscious and non-verbal – from which individual memories emerge and that speak to the experiences, traumatic and otherwise, that are formed within the space of detention. The “thickness” of the white space speaks of displaced memories or disavowal, from within the Australian political scene (the lack of recognition towards so-called ‘others’), but also of an intense layering of the

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many lived experiences that are not being heard or remembered as they teem within the hyperscreen.2 Against this backdrop, the formation of conscious memories plays an important role in drawing attention to the precarity and resilience of life in detention. While in “A Guard’s Story” the remembrance of individual lives in detention is portrayed through the guard’s perspective, “Villawood” generates a particular form of collective memory through the incorporation of asylum seeker art in the comic. The images drawn by the detainees demonstrate a microcosm of comics art in their diversity of representation ranging from more cartoonish to more photorealistic. For example, Jalal from Iran draws the repressive circumstances from which he has fled as a chessboard surrounded by barbed wire, on which he stands looking worried, whereas Bashir Jafari, a Hazara Afghani, draws a “blood curdling” image of a Taliban soldier holding four decapitated heads in a scene entitled “Death”. Some of the scenes drawn by Safdar Ahmed include photographs, and as discussed in the preceding chapter, the diversity of representation confirms the varying modes through which memories are encoded. The hand-drawn aspect of comics is important, particularly in circumnavigating restrictions on recording scenes in or around detention centres through other forms of record such as photography or audio-visual record. The indexical mark of the artist’s hand offers a further mode of connection between reader and the text beyond the transmission of the content itself. As Johanna Drucker suggests, the ‘energy’ of drawings by hand imparts a “lively immediacy, vigor, and an urgency to communicate that becomes part of the urgency of the story” (2008, 44). This kind of communication gains particular traction when considered in relation to Rebecca Scherr’s discussion of ‘haptic visuality’, which she posits as “a connective readerly address incorporating sensation and emotion in its communicative reach” (“Shaking Hands” 2013, 21). The ‘tactile’ quality of the line drawing “continually communicates the subjective and affective dimensions of the content presented” (24), rendering these forgotten memories through the line of the artist’s pen.

“A Guard’s Story” “At Work Inside Our Detention Centres: A Guard’s Story” was published online in February 2014 by the non-profit (and now non-operational) news site, The Global Mail. The story depicts an anonymous narrator’s experience working as a guard inside one of Australia’s detention centres. Motivated by a desire to see what life was like “on the inside”, they decided to work as a “client support worker – a guard – for Serco, a multinational company that operated detention centres on the Australian mainland”. The story follows the narrator’s training as a guard before focussing on several episodes from their employment at a detention centre.3 Over time, the brutalising treatment of the detainees has a dramatic impact on the narrator’s wellbeing and the story ends with their resignation. By sharing this experience, the narrator breaches a confidentiality agreement with Serco to refrain from disclosing

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details about their work. The secrecy surrounding the subsequent act of narration and the use of a hand-drawn form to communicate this non-fictional story are thus critical aspects to the production of this piece. The production of the comic came at a time when Australia had largely abrogated its humanitarian responsibilities under international law, and particularly the 1951 Refugee Convention. In May 2013, the Australian Federal Government passed amendments to the Commonwealth Migration Act 1958 (‘Migration Act’) that excised mainland Australia from the “migration zone”. Previously, asylum seekers who reached the Australian mainland could not be sent offshore for processing. Following amendments to the Migration Act, asylum seekers to Australia were transferred to the tiny Pacific nation of Nauru and Manus Island in Papua New Guinea and held in mandatory detention for an indefinite period of time. The detrimental impact of detention was clearly expressed by Gillian Triggs, President of the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC), who stated that, “34 per cent of children detained in Australia and Christmas Island have a mental health disorder of such severity that they require psychiatric support” (AHRC 2015). This followed the release of the AHRC report, “The Forgotten Children: National Inquiry into Children in Immigration Detention 2014”, which recommended the release of all children in detention, and for the Migration Act to be amended so that children and parents can only be detained for limited length of time. The report was received with hostility by the Australian Federal Government, with some MPs calling for Triggs’ resignation on the basis that the “Forgotten Children” report was tainted by bias.4 In “Villawood” and “A Guard’s Story”, the mistreatment of refugees and asylum seekers reaches an apex in the recapitulation of detention space as a “zone of indistinction”, an argument supported by statements by the UNHCR in 2017 that the humanitarian crisis on Manus Island is a “damning indictment of a policy meant to avoid Australia’s international obligations” (Davidson 2017).5 In 2016, around 2,000 incident reports from Nauru were leaked, which described physical and sexual assaults, records of child abuse, and attempts at self-harm that constellate life in detention. The “Nauru files”, as they are known, are available online, and portray disturbing accounts of life in detention (Evershed et al. 2016; Flitton 2014; Doherty 2016), confirming the urgency of the recommendations in the 2014 AHRC report. Moreover, in 2014, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, Juan Mendez, found that various aspects of Australia’s asylum seeker policies violate the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. Specifically, paragraph 31 of his report found that the Government of Australia “has violated the rights of migrants and asylum seekers to be free from torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment” under the Convention Against Torture “by failing to amend the provisions of the two bills to comply with the State’s obligations under international human rights law, particularly with regard to the rights of migrants, and asylum seekers, including children” (Human Rights Council 2015, 9).

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Against this political landscape, the comics journalism of “A Guard’s Story” offers a striking depiction of the plight of individuals in detention centres. ‘Comics journalism’ is a term most frequently associated with the work of Joe Sacco, in titles such as Palestine (2003). As Sacco has written, [t]here will always exist, when presenting journalism in the comics form, a tension between those things that can be verified, like a quote caught on tape, and those things that defy verification, such as a drawing purporting to represent a specific episode. Sacco goes on to note that “there is nothing literal about a drawing, and that cartoonists arrange the elements of a story ‘deliberately’ and ‘with intent’ on the page” (emphasis in the original, Journalism 2012, xi). This is what I call the ‘opaque legibility’ of comics – that their words and images are highly mediated, and self-consciously so. This is not to suggest that drawings, or words, cannot or should not be accurate, but that the comics form supports different approaches to representation because of its capacity for non-mimetic representation. In other words, the organisation of the panels and their contents offer windows into the worlds they represent. How these windows are positioned, and the contents they capture, are unique to each creator’s pen. In contrast to Sacco’s auteur projects, “A Guard’s Story” was created through a collaborative effort between journalist Nick Olle, artist Sam Wallman, designer Pat Armstrong, producer Pat Grant, and the anonymous ‘guard’ of the story. This attribute of the text sets it apart from sole-authored comics such as Fun Home by Alison Bechdel, Art Spiegelman’s Maus, and Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, and aligns it more closely with the collectively created nature of The Photographer and Waltz with Bashir, as discussed in Chapter 5. The co-creators of “A Guard’s Story” explain that they maintained close communication with the narrator to ensure that his or her experiences were recorded accurately. Indeed, Nick Olle has explained that aside from a brief statement about Serco, the comic narrative directly reflects interviews with the narrator (Fisher 2014). “A Guard’s Story”, however, is not the first visual exposé on dysfunction within Australian detention centres. In 2008, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Four Corners programme produced a report entitled “The Guard’s Story”, which traced the experiences of several guards working inside one of Australia’s most notorious detention centres at Woomera, before this centre was eventually closed in 2002 (McDermott 2008). Much like the narrator’s experiences in “A Guard’s Story”, the guards interviewed on Four Corners spoke of the poor training offered to trainee guards, and the prevalence of selfharm and deterioration in mental health among detainees and guards alike, including the emergence of post-traumatic stress disorder in both groups. The programme also revealed footage of episodic violence within Woomera as recorded by several guards working there. “A Guard’s Story”, then, might be regarded as a continuation of the Four Corners report in a different medium.

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The memory of the spaces of detention thus emerges in transmedial iterations, each form bringing a particular range of associations and meanings to bear upon the significance of Australia’s policy positions for the people incarcerated in these centres. As illustrator Sam Wallman explains, the piece offers a useful ‘entry point’ into discussions about the treatment of refugees and asylum seekers in Australia. The production of the narrative created substantial comment in an already uneasy political landscape about the place and plight of asylum seekers in Australia. The mobility of the text online is critical to the transmission of its testimony as media bans on detention centres have meant that the detainees drawn by Wallman are infrequently heard or seen in mainstream news media. Their images are mostly found in brief clips on news media – frequently depicted behind fences, or in transit, as though that is their ontological status ab initio. As a contrapuntal cultural narrative, “A Guard’s Story” complicates this dominant narrative about the (non)place of asylum seekers in Australia by depicting individual stories – about the asylum seekers as well as the guards – and whose stories are wound together, and sometimes more intimately, than might otherwise be imagined. Ironically, in the same month as “A Guard’s Story” was published, the Australian Department of Customs and Border Control also released a comic aimed at deterring wouldbe asylum seekers to Australia, known as the “Afghanistan Storyboard”. The 18-page story, written in Afghani and intended for an Afghan audience, depicts a young man who tearfully leaves his family in his home before arriving in Australia by boat. As part of the Government’s ‘No Way’ campaign – “there’s ‘no way’ you’ll stay in Australia if you arrive without a visa” – this work was criticised by Amnesty International and the Council for Refugee Advocacy (Australia) for its underlying message, which perversely appeared to suggest that detention in Australia was “worse” than conditions in the homeland.6 At the time of writing, the comic has been cached, but its production in this context is significant because it signals the use of the comics form to promote Australian government policy. Safdar Ahmed, creator of “Villawood” commented on this comic, stating, [w]hat was horrible about that comic was it didn’t show a common refugee, it tried to depict the refugee as an economic migrant, which is to trivialize the real issue. That isn’t the history of Afghan refugees at all. They aren’t tired of working in a shitty job, they are threatened by the Taliban and anyone in their shoes would get up and leave and go to a different country too. (Braithwaite 2015) Johanna Drucker suggests that “graphic novels are uniquely contemporary phenomena for reasons that combine technological opportunity and cultural disposition” (2008, 39). In the case of “A Guard’s Story”, this technological vector is highlighted by the story’s publication via an online platform. The

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mobility of its content online helped make the story a ‘global’ phenomenon, such that a blog dedicated to ‘World Comics Finland’ actively promoted the story, while a frenzied discussion on how to share the story on reddit’s Australian platform unfolded. In an online context, the graphic narrative form readily incorporates the digital dimension to its system of signification precisely because it already operates at the nexus between visual and verbal forms of communication. Online comics range from simple drawings to strips that incorporate gif animations in novel and delightful ways. One of the most remarkable is Luke Pearson’s strip, “Some People” (2009), which uses narrative loops to create stories that are at once rhizomatic yet cohesive in structure. Like many comics, Pearson’s strip invites the reader to slow down by utilising loops in the narrative to first confuse and then reward the patient reader. Across this exploratory spectrum, one can discern how the bi-ocularity of visual-verbal texts allows artists to complicate the representation of time and space across the surface of the page, utilising rhythm, balance, and shifts in perspective to experience the text as an embodied process. Even where the panels are presented in a traditional ‘comic strip’ format, the sequential nature of the narrative encourages the reader to move back-and-forth between frames to confirm, query, or unsettle their interpretation of the text. This embodied oscillation mimics the way in which we learn to interpret the world by testing established forms of knowledge and discovering the unknown as we move through time. Reading in this mode is particularly useful where a new or unfamiliar perspective is being presented because it asks the reader to engage with frequently defamiliarised ways of seeing the world. These techniques are all evident in “A Guard’s Story”. The opening sentence of “A Guard’s Story” states: “I always knew indefinite detention did bad things to people”. This statement is accompanied by the hand-drawn image of a man’s face placed behind bars that mimic gutters (Figure 6.1). The bars are striking for the way they are formed through the use of negative space; that is, the white space that dominates the narrative. Staring out blankly, the man’s face is trapped by bars that emerge and are swallowed by the screen. This composition brings to mind the opening sequence of The Four Immigrants Manga, where Frank and Charlie are initially held at the Angel Island Immigration Station. The use of bars and fences to depict the spaces in which these characters reside is an important framing device for their status as migrants and refugees.7 Significantly, the stories in both texts develop their respective characters’ stories from this preliminary status onwards, subverting the mode in which they are initially ‘contained’ symbolically and literally. Scrolling ‘down’, the next image depicts the man’s head, now from an angle, revealing it carved open where the bars were initially placed (Figure 6.2). Unaccompanied by words, the violence of his presumed indefinite detention is made known through the physical deformation of his head. Read sequentially, these opening images are important because of the way that the shift in perspective – and adjustment in the use of white space – reveals vastly different messages. The first image is presented to the reader en face, the man’s visage

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Figure 6.1 “White Bars”. Image provided courtesy of Sam Wallman, Nick Olle, Pat Grant, and Pat Armstrong. “At Work Inside Our Detention Centres: A Guard’s Story” (February 2014). The Global Mail. theglobalmail.org.

interrupted by the bars. Much like this outlook, the visual message seems fairly straightforward. The second image, however, challenges this assumption as the man’s head is splayed, dissected by oblique angles suggestive of the trauma of ongoing incarceration. The new viewpoint allows the viewer to discern the violence that lies behind the initial image. It seems that ‘indefinite detention’ has taken its toll on the subject before us, for reasons that as yet remain unknown. The opening statement thus confirms that this is a story told in retrospect and that the images are informed by this proleptic understanding. In Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (2004), Judith Butler defines ‘indefinite detention’ as an “illegitimate exercise of power”, an operation that is “part of a broader tactic to neutralize the rule of law in the name of security” (67). Butler continues that “‘[i]ndefinite detention’ does not signify an exceptional circumstance, but, rather, the means by which the exceptional becomes established as a naturalized norm” (67). Butler’s definition of the term falls within her analysis on the indeterminate status of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, which in turn informs her broader discussion

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Figure 6.2 “Wounded Head”. Image provided courtesy of Sam Wallman, Nick Olle, Pat Grant, and Pat Armstrong. “At Work Inside Our Detention Centres: A Guard’s Story” (February 2014). The Global Mail. theglobalmail.org.

about what constitutes a ‘grievable life’. Although “A Guard’s Story” arises in response to the treatment of asylum seekers, rather than political prisoners, ‘detainees’ in Guantanamo and Australia are both subject to what might be described as extra-judicial laws, designed to keep these groups beyond the reach of the rule of law.8 It is the horror of this occlusion – what Agamben terms the “state of exception” – that “A Guard’s Story” speaks out against. Like Butler, Agamben identifies a specific reduction at work in states of exception, most particularly how the subject of the exception is reduced to “bare life”, occupying “a zone of indistinction and continuous transition between man and beast” (Homo Sacer 1998, 109). This zone of indistinction is instantiated through the state of exception – an inherent aspect of the law which permits the law, or laws, to be set aside as required, but usually only in circumstances of “emergency”, in which either the state or some essential element of it are gravely imperilled. In an Australian context, we can see the operation of this manoeuvre clearly through the amendments to the Migration Act. That is, without the sovereign operation of the statute in the first instance, it would not be possible to amend the law so as to exclude its operation under its new form. By adopting a simple schematic comparison, “A Guard’s Story” draws attention to the negative materialities of a biopolitical order, and specifically

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the way in which the ‘state of exception’ operates as the “preliminary condition for any definition of the relation that binds and at the same time, abandons the living to the law” (State of Exception 2005, 1). The story extends the connectedness between space, memory, and the haptic representation of bodies – found in print narratives such as Persepolis, Fun Home, and Maus, among others – into a digital context. Readers can observe the ways in which indefinite detention conscripts the bodies it circumnavigates to a zone of indistinction. The boundaries in the first scene acquire the force of material reality against the individuals whose bodies they bisect, depicted as solid black lines that cross and contain those bodies. Here the detainees are depicted in painfully contorted positions– similar to the depiction of bodies in Epileptic – but here vulnerable to the outsized graphic boundaries that cleave them. By contrast, the second scene depicts the ease with which other individuals – those without the “state of exception” – can circulate within and traverse lines of exclusion. Accordingly, those boundaries now acquire ‘regular’ proportions, ready to be stepped or flown over, and mostly disregarded. In corporeal terms, we see that the indeterminate status of asylum seekers can acquire what Judith Butler calls the “violence of derealisation” (Precarious Life 2004, 32) in terms of their representation as racial and cultural others, whose presence is “neither alive nor dead but interminably spectral” (32–33). The spectrality of which Butler speaks echoes Agamben’s notion of ‘bare life’ where the biopolitical contours of detention are realised through the material incursions of the non-being afforded to the inmates of the detention centre. The detainees’ bodies are defined negatively – similar to the white space that carves out their enclosure – so that their corporeality is made solid when they are tattooed by the boundaries around them. In this case, their bodies are bifurcated not only by the legal and political lines that hold them, but also in their psychic disavowal from the memory of the nation-state. The narrative structure of “A Guard’s Story” is devoid of frames or panels altogether. Informally, the screen acts as an extra-diegetic panel that frames some of the segments, however, the preponderance of white space is one of the most notable aspects of this piece. As Tony Hughes-d’Aeth suggests, the impact of a field without borders is that it “implicates the seer into the world of the seen” (2001, 213). This is relevant to “A Guard’s Story”, where ‘not-seeing’, represented by the white field of the interface, is transformed into a negative space that shapes and holds its narrative contents. The use of white space to ‘de-frame’ the story, instead of panels to maintain a comfortable distance between the narrative and the reader, is significant because of the way it positions the reader to engage with the story’s destabilising impulse. The absence of formal frames in “A Guard’s Story” enhances the dispossession of its contents, mimicking the precarious and uncertain status of the detainees – as psychic, embodied and legal subjects – over substantial, if not indefinite periods of time. Here, the preponderance of white space seems thick with unresolved meaning, as it surrounds the people and objects within it, if not threatening to engulf them altogether.

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The unframed space acts as a multiple signifier of the guard’s memories where the images are presented as fragments of a difficult time. Suspended in space, the scenes of remembrance are splintered rather than adhering to a strict chronology, and represent scenes (witnessed and imagined) of particular significance that continue to haunt the narrator. The absence of frames means that the narrative moves seamlessly within and without the space of imprisonment, as it incorporates different settings into its path. This strategy also mimics the concept of an indefinite time period, in tension with a finite and coherent narrative, as suggested by its title. This fluidity supports the exploratory nature of the text as it brings together diverse settings, people, and ideas within the narrative to create liberated space. In this context, the white space holds ambiguous, multivalent meanings, similar to its presence in Persepolis, and Stitches, as discussed in Chapters 3 and 4, respectively. Contrary to the physical and psychological borders that lock away the detainees, in “A Guard’s Story” the detainees occupy the same humanised space as their others who enjoy ‘mainstream’ legal and social rights. If the white space threatens to engulf the detainees, it also presents a threat to the legitimacy of the guards, particularly through its disruptive representation of their training, and ordinance. For example, the story commences with the narrator’s employment with Serco. Here, the reader is granted a glimpse into the training offered to the would-be guards, the narrative moving between training scenes and the narrator’s thoughts. One activity involves a ‘restraint’ exercise for which the narrator acts as the ‘detainee’. He states that “as it was happening … all I could think was that this was happening to a refugee inside the centre or a Tamil guy who had lived through a war and was fleeing torture” (ellipsis in original). The picture accompanying this statement depicts the narrator lying underneath two co-workers, who look at each other as they contemplate their success in executing the exercise. In contrast, the narrator looks out towards the reader, his face lying behind a row of three elongated masks. These veneers depict the narrator’s imagining of the refugees as they are pacified – their physical restraint perhaps reinvoking the traumas they have previously withstood. The sequential placement of the masks also indicates the empathic relation between the narrator and the refugees he encounters. Not surprisingly perhaps, the narrator’s internal response to the training exercise is “I couldn’t handle it”, and this statement resides below the image of a large messy black knot. Here then, the white space integrates remembered scenes of training with iconic, abstract representation (the knot) to create an experimental narrative. This inclusiveness renders these disparate spaces on an equal footing for the reader – an imagined space that at least partially emancipates the narrative contents, such as the narrator’s internal thoughts as well as processes within the detention centre, from their invisibility. The impact of the story is also apparent in Wallman’s comments about the difficult process involved in its production,

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The brutality of which Wallman speaks finds its way into the text, both in its content, and form. In a digital context, the physical connectedness between reader and text is enhanced by the scrolling that is inherent to the interface. As one scrolls downward, people and objects appear to float on-screen circumscribed by a spatial and temporal vacuum. In representational terms, it appears that the narrator’s experiences have ‘undone’ the ability to neatly hold the narrative within a regular structure. The absence of panels means that the reader cannot hold onto any rhythmic associations to guide their reading, but must confront the lack of momentum to propel their progression through the text. This lack replicates the space of indefinite detention and the reader is asked to work harder to allocate perspective to the images that emerge from the white space. In Butler’s words, what we encounter is something that “exceeds the frame that troubles our sense of reality; in other words, something occurs that does not conform to our established understanding of things” (Frames of War 2009, 9). We see this in practice in “A Guard’s Story” (Figure 6.3), where the untethered contents of the narrative float on-screen, and the entire work is characterised by a limbo that surrounds the status of

Figure 6.3 “Untethered Contents”. Image provided courtesy of Sam Wallman, Nick Olle, Pat Grant, and Pat Armstrong. “At Work Inside Our Detention Centres: A Guard’s Story” (February 2014). The Global Mail. theglobalmail.org.

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the detainees, represented visually not only through the use of white space, but also signified through the uprooted buildings that punctuate the story, and which act as markers of transitions in the narrative’s arcs. Dislodged from any recognisable setting, the floating structure suggests a state of transition along with uncertainty about its significance – reminiscent of the farmhouse in which Dorothy travels from Kansas to Oz. It also offers a visual approximation of the ‘zone of indistinction’ of which Agamben speaks. In “A Guard’s Story”, however, it not only the buildings that are deracinated: in one sequence, the narrator recalls hearing about a child refugee who “cut his head open on the way home from school”. This incident is illustrated from the interior perspective of the bus, and with little to orient the scene. The reader is presented with a bus-seat bearing the child, with the deep angle of the seat lying perpendicular to the adjacent windows, and immediately the mismatched angles heighten the traumatic trajectory of the child’s journey. The view through the bus window mimics the structure of the story as a whole, the downward tilt revealing a gradual descent from the view of sky-scrapers, through the Earth’s crust to what looks like an exploding magma core. This micro-sequence powerfully supports the devastation of the main action. The subsequent panel depicts the bus in quarter-profile, a stylised stream of blood streaming forth from the open door of the bus. Recalling the frequency of selfharm by the detainees, the narrator remembers another incident where a man placed broken glass in his mouth, threatening to swallow the shards if he was not permitted to meet with his caseworker. The horrific contrast between the desperation of this act and the simplicity of the demand is captured in the image of a man whose desperate eyes look out to the reader, while his mouth is bloodied and covered by slivers of glass. His careworn face and electrified hair contribute to the impact of this recollection, and it is precisely the hand-drawn images that make this representation all the more visceral as they connect the reader to the artist’s hand and to the haptic visuality of the text. At times only parts of an image are exposed or remembered. For example, in the next panel, the violence of detention is now writ explicitly on the body, as the narrator explains that “…self-harm was really common in the detention centres…everywhere you looked there were people with fresh cuts and scars up their arms”. These statements bookend the drawing of a forearm in close focus, with a ‘Victorian’ state border tattooing the upper arm, before morphing into the form of scars and fresh cuts towards the wrist (Figure 6.4).9 As an analogue to self-harm, the social and intimate impact of detention is represented in this image, where the body becomes the material site over and through which boundaries are contested and shaped. The policing of bodies that the guards undertake is a material process in its own right, as well as a metaphor for the federally mandated policing of the Australian mainland and its territories. The story presents detention as a liminal space that is at once part of but also expelled from the nation through the exposure of its subjects to extra-juridical ‘laws’. In this space, the body as a bio political site is brought into sharp relief, evident in the actions of the asylum seekers such as

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Figure 6.4 “Marking Boundaries”. Image provided courtesy of Sam Wallman. © Sam Wallman, Nick Olle, Pat Grant, and Pat Armstrong. “At Work Inside Our Detention Centres: A Guard’s Story” (February 2014). The Global Mail. theglobalmail.org.

self-harm. Wallman’s drawings are somewhat similar to the searing images of Joe Sacco, where human appendages appear somehow more flexible than their material equivalents. Far from detracting from their impact, the representation of suppleness in the subject’s bodies reminds the viewer of the vulnerability of the body, as well as its ability to bear – up to a point – inhumane conditions. Their elasticity also, I suggest, bears the mark of their trauma. These bodies are elastic because they have had to contend with suffering and deprivation – and their figuration speaks of these conditions. By foreclosing the representation of asylum seekers, these images thwart the concerns that are otherwise being presented. Over time, the strain of working as a guard becomes overwhelming, and the narrator decides to resign, suffering from deteriorations in his or her relationships and mental health. The narrator concludes, “[n]obody on the outside believed how bad it was in there”, and this brings the main action to a close. In the story’s brief coda, the narrator encounters two Rohingyan asylum seekers from the detention centre in a suburban mall – from one centre to another. In detention, the two men had staged a silent protest by standing on a roof, with the narrator noting, “I don’t know how long they were there for”. The narrator explains, “we [the guard’s] were told not to look at them or speak to them…to pretend they weren’t there” (ellipsis in original). Acting against this injunction, however, the narrator notes, “I used to look up and wave at them when no-one was looking”. Responding to the narrator’s recognition of their presence, the men “waved back but never smiled”, and it is this simple, yet powerful exchange that impresses itself upon the narrator’s mind. This image is repeated at the end of the narrative and the recognition of the Rohingyan men to the narrator’s acknowledgement offers something of a reprieve – a literal and metaphorical afterlife – to the deprivation of

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recognition within the detention centre. Perhaps more than any other sequence in the story, this episode conveys how sight and vision – as non-verbal forms of communication – can recognise what would otherwise be denied. In the case of the Rohingyan men, their presence is disavowed within the detention centre; the employees are instructed not to look at them precisely because of the knowledge that the men are on the roof. The men also look back at the guard, and it is their gaze that is represented in the story, and their faces and the hands are brought out of the white space that otherwise consumes their bodies. Like their faces, their open, outward-facing palms denote the communication that is taking place.10 Yet their downcast gaze resists the reader’s desire to be acknowledged, producing an effect similar to the disavowal to which the men are subject. Judith Butler suggests that “[t]o learn to see the frame that blinds us to what we see is no easy matter” (Frames of War 2009, 100). In “A Guard’s Story”, readers are presented with a new perspective on the space of the camp as a biopolitical site in an Australian context. Remarkably, the narrative offers this insight through the eyes of a guard, a usually maligned figure within discussions of biopolitics. In this context, the devastating impact of detention is represented not only in relation to the detainees, but also on the subjects that would police them. The narrative draws attention, literally, to the physical connectedness of the detainees, in the ways they support each other and the privileged position of the guard allows comparisons to be created between life inside and outside the space of the camp. Through the haptic visuality of the text, and the use of scrolling, the narrative offers an important extension of the biopolitical impulse of comics into the digital realm. “A Guard’s Story” continues the exploratory work of graphic narratives through its formal innovations. Discarding the use of traditional panels introduces an interruption of normalised reading, at least in the context of reading Western graphic narratives, and the text thus offers a self-reflexive consideration of how perspectives are formed and discarded. As with other graphic narratives such as Siberia (2006) by Nikoli Maslov, the hand-drawn images offer intimate and indexical marks of the artist as he rendered the narrator’s story into a visible and recognisable form. In so doing, the story begins to ‘unrepress’ a narrative by inviting readers to witness its difficult contours.

“Villawood” A mission similar to that of “A Guard’s Story” motivates Safdar Ahmed’s “Villawood”, as it portrays the lived experiences of asylum seekers in detention and their resilience therein. As Ahmed states, the comic is not a “comprehensive, monological account of what happens in detention, but attempts to show some of the common, everyday hardships related by those I’ve met, and the ways people assert their agency and resistance” (Castle 2015). Influenced by Joe Sacco’s comics journalism, Sam Wallman, Robert Crumb, and underground comix more generally, “Villawood” portrays the spaces of detention not only

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through Ahmed’s story but extends its visual lexicon by incorporating a range of drawings made by the detainees themselves. Along with co-founders Bilquis Ghani and Omid Tofighian, Ahmed helped establish the Refugee Art Project in 2010, an organisation that holds regular workshops for individuals in the Villawood Detention Centre. The Project’s aim is to “facilitate the art and self-expression of asylum seekers and refugees, which is then presented to the Australian public through our exhibitions and publications, in order to challenge and educate the wider community” (“Refugee Art Project”). The images available on the site’s gallery include a broad array of themes, rendered in watercolour, pen, ink, as well as “coffee paintings”—a technique developed by an Iraqi detainee (name unknown), who then passed on the technique of mixing instant coffee with water onto other asylum seekers (“Refugee Art Project”). In “Villawood”, Ahmed similarly incorporates sketches drawn by detainees to create an intra-archive of communal memories and remembrance. The comic depicts the author’s first visit to the eponymous detention centre in Sydney, Australia. At the centre, he sets up a “small art workshop” as a way to “get to know people”, finding that, “without always putting it into words, some refugees draw about their experiences” prior to their arrival in Australia, as well as in detention. One of the detainees, Ahmad, depicts his experience of indefinite detention through a symbolic composition, alongside a smaller sketch (Figure 6.5). Consisting of a collection of images, the first panel appears to have been drawn over a relatively extended period, while the adjoining panel is more realistically rendered, with iconic representation of Ahmad’s face

Figure 6.5 “Symbolic Composition”. Image provided courtesy of Safdar Ahmed. © Safdar Ahmed. “Villawood: Notes from an Immigration Detention Centre’, web comic, GetUp! – The Shipping News. Used with permission of Safdar Ahmed.

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drawn behind a wire fence. The abstracted elements in the first panel, such as the scales, weeping eye, and candle-leg chained to a wall, are not placed in a sequential order but rather arranged schematically. This arrangement encourages readers to bring a range of associations to bear on how the elements may be understood in relation to one another. The move between the two modes of signification – symbolic and realistic – speaks of the way in which the representation of traumatic events can be variably encoded in explicit and implicit memories, as they speak of a fractured relationship with, in this instance, indefinite detention while grappling with other traumata. Here, meaning is deferred so that it exists in between these alternate forms of representation. The comic also reproduces Ahmad’s handwriting, with the caption noting that the latter would write “beautiful couplets on napkins in Urdu” (Figure 6.6). A translation of a selected couplet is provided, and the colouring and texture of the panel background invites the reader to stay with the image over a longer duration of time. Sadly, Ahmad’s handwriting has come to act as a trace of his now belated presence; the comic details his death from a presumed heart attack while in detention at the age of 26. The textual presence of Ahmad’s poetry and his friends’ recalling the circumstances of his death speak against his erasure. By layering the space of comic with multiple accounts of community and commemoration, “Villawood” creates a literal frame of recognition that persists beyond his death. As with other texts that the preceding chapters have discussed, “Villawood” includes a photographic referent – a replica of a poster that Ahmad’s friends distributed around the centre, with the heading “Killed by immigration” above his photograph. Similar to the cross-discursive strategies in The Photographer, the presence of the photograph confirms Ahmad’s absence and enlivens his drawn representations that have come earlier in the comic. The inclusion of images drawn

Figure 6.6 “Couplets in Urdu”. Image provided courtesy of Safdar Ahmed. © Safdar Ahmed. “Villawood: Notes from an Immigration Detention Centre”, web comic, GetUp! – The Shipping News. Used with permission of Safdar Ahmed.

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by the asylum seekers, as well as Ahmad’s photograph, remind the reader of the lives that have been lived, as well as lost, in Villawood and other detention centres. This raises a question explored throughout this book – how do individuals and communities grieve for lives that have not been recognised as such in mainstream cultural, legal and political domains?

Conclusion In September 2017, the Supreme Court of Victoria approved the proposed settlement of the Manus Island class action for the payment of $70 million dollars between 2000 detainees – Australia’s largest human rights class action settlement. This action was brought on behalf of persons detained on Manus Island from November 2012 until December 2014 (the Negligence Claim Period), and from November 2012 until May 2016 (False Imprisonment Claim), and was against the Commonwealth of Australia, and the detention centre operators (G4S Australia Pty Ltd and Broadspectrum Pty Ltd). Had the matter gone to trial, the court would have heard evidence from detainees detailing deaths inside the detention centre, allegations of systemic sexual and physical abuse, and allegations of inadequate medical treatment leading to injury and death. One of the lawyers for the class action stated, [w]e sued the Commonwealth of Australia and their subcontractors and we said ‘you’ve got a duty of care’. The Commonwealth did not want that tested in a court of law. The Commonwealth settled this case and paid $70m not to have that fiction tested in court. We think that fiction is now at an end and the Commonwealth has a duty to these people and ought to discharge that duty by treating them fairly. (Blackwell 2017) The judgement was made available via a live feed, and picked up in major newspapers such as The Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian, and the Huffington Post (Supreme Court of Victoria 2018). The circulation of this story is particularly important given the secrecy that has shrouded Australia’s immigration detention policy and the outsourcing of management of the centres to private companies. The Manus detention centre was formally closed in October 2017, although the status of the people held there as yet remains indeterminate. The work of comics artists, including the authors of “A Guard’s Story”, as well as Safdar Ahdmed’s award-winning “Villawood”, are of vital and vitalising importance to bring awareness to Australia’s immigration policies and the lived experiences of indefinite detention. This describes only one of the many remarkable roles that comics can play in our communities - to transmit information in new and imaginative ways. By doing so, they can encourage us to see afresh and see anew, and to regard individuals who are otherwise largely invisible. This returns the reader to Edward Said’s reflections about comics as a medium that tended to defy “ordinary processes of thought, which are policed,

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shaped and re-shaped by all sorts of pedagogical as well as ideological pressures” (2003, ii). The comics discussed herein encourage readers to actively engage with the characters they meet within the pages and screens of comics such as “A Guard’s Story” and “Villawood”. By doing so, they encounter the lived experiences that make up the specificities of what it means to seek asylum, or live elsewhere as a migrant or refugee. These productive complications are supported by the mechanics of comics, where words and images can intermingle yet retain their distinct presence on the page. This mode of operation means that the indexical, symbolic, and iconic forms of signification mimic the different kinds of sensorial and visual inputs through which memories are encoded.

Notes 1 I use the term ‘hyperframe’ after Thierry Groensteen (who borrows the word from Benoît Peeters) in The System of Comics, p. 30. 2 In an article on Persepolis, Hilary Chute uses the term “thickness” to refer to a solid black panel in the text, arguing that this technique does not represent the “scarcity of memory” but rather its “depth” (“The Texture of Retracing” 2008, 98). I adopt this term in relation to the white screen as something that represents both an emptying out of memory, but which also holds a multiplicity of memories in a layered space. 3 For the remainder of the chapter I will refer to the narrator as a ‘he’, as that accords with the way that the character is represented, however, as noted, the actual identity of the guard remains undisclosed. 4 http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/revealed-abbott-governm ent-tried-to-remove-gillian-triggs-as-head-of-the-australian-human-rights-comm ission-20150213-13du7s.html 5 For a more explicit argument drawing parallels between offshore detention centres and concentration camps, see Stephen Charles AO, who previously served as a judge on the Supreme Court of Victoria’s Court of Appeal, “Our detention centres are concentration camps and must be closed” (2016). 6 See Gary Cox, “Refugees Angered by Government’s Graphic Novel Campaign” (2015). 7 The imagery of detainees held behind fences is also utilised on the cover of Volume 4, number 22 of Captain America (2002), where the latter visits Guantanamo. In this cover, Captain America’s back is prominently turned towards the reader as he faces a fence holding the Guantanamo detainees. In contrast to both “A Guard’s Story” and The Four Immigrants Manga, the faces of the detainees are not legible, and their uniform skin colour is noticeably ‘non-white’. Their status as prisoners is confirmed predominantly through the recognisable orange colour of their jumpsuits. 8 Indeed, an article run by the Sydney Morning Herald on 25 August 2014 draws a closer connection between the two loci in its title, “Refugees’ Mental Anguish in Australia’s ‘Guantanamo’”. The article claims that “Australia’s policy of indefinite detention of the refugees with adverse security findings was found by the United Nations last August to be in breach of more than 140 international laws and conventions, but a year later the government is yet to respond to the ruling”. smh.com.au (accessed 14 September 2014). 9 Here, the image of the tattooed arm bears a close visual resemblance to Agamben’s concerns in “No to Bio-Political Tattooing” (2004), in which he discusses his refusal to be subject to fingerprinting upon arrival to the United States as a practice of control that “had always been properly considered inhumane and exceptional”.

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10 For a detailed consideration of the link between hands, connectedness, and haptic visuality, see Rebecca Scherr, “Shaking Hands with Other People’s Pain: Joe Sacco’s Palestine” (2013).

Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. Print. Agamben, Giorgio. “No to Bio-Political Tattooing”. January 2004. Accessed 18 June 2015. www.egs.edu/faculty/giorgio-agamben/articles/no-to-bio-political-tattooing/. Web. Ahmed, Safdar. “Villawood”. The Shipping News. 5 March 2015. Accessed 18 February 2018. medium.com/shipping-news/villawood-9698183e114c. Web. Australian Human Rights Commission. “‘Locking up Children Taints Us All’, says Commission President”. 12 February 2015. Accessed 20 June 2015. www.humanrights. gov.au/news/stories/locking-children-taints-us-all-says-commission-president. Web. Australian Customs and Border Protection Services. “Afghanistan Storyboard.” Web. 10 March 2014. www.customs.gov.au/webdata/resources/files/Storyboard-Afghanistan. pdf. Web. Blackwell, Eoin. “Supreme Court Approves $70 million Compensation Payout for Manus Detainees”. HuffPost. 6 September 2017. https://www.huffingtonpost.com. au/2017/09/05/supreme-court-approves-70-million-compensation-payout-for-manusdetainees_a_23198170/. Accessed 27 May 2018. Web. Braithwaite, Charlie. “The Webcomic That Documents Life in Australia’s Immigration Detention Centres”. Vice. 11 March 2015. www.vice.com/en_uk/article/ppxym7/sa fdar-ahmeds-comic-villawood-documents-life-in-immigration-detention. Accessed 18 February 2018. Web. Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?London: Verso, 2009. Print. Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso, 2004. Print. Castle, Anthony N. “Interview with Villawood creator Safdar Ahmed”. Australian Comics Journal. 4 December 2015. australiancomicsjournal.com/wp/interview-with-villawoodcreator-safdar-ahmed/. Accessed 18 February 2018. Web. Charles, Stephen. “Our Detention Centres are Concentration Camps and Must be Closed”. The Sydney Morning Herald. 4 May 2016. www.smh.com.au/comment/ our-detention-centres-are-intentionally-cruel-and-must-be-closed-20160504-golr04. html. Accessed 18 February 2018. Web. Chute, Hillary. “The Texture of Retracing in Marjane Satrapi’s ‘Persepolis’”. Women’s Studies Quarterly 36. 1/2 (2008): 92–110. Print. Cox, Gary. “Refugees Angered by Government’s Graphic Novel Campaign”. 10 April 2015. www.sbs.com.au/news/refugees-angered-by-government-s-graphic-novel-campaign. Accessed 18 February 2018. Web. Davidson, Helen. “Manus Humanitarian Crisis a ‘Damning Indictment’ of Australia’s Refugee Policy: UNHCR”. The Guardian. 21 November 2017. www.theguardian. com/australia-news/2017/nov/22/manus-humanitarian-crisis-a-damning-indictm ent-of-australias-refugee-policy-unhcr. Accessed 25 January 2018. Web. Doherty, Ben. “The Nauru Files: A Short History of Nauru, Australia’s Dumping Ground for Refugees”. The Guardian. 9 August 2016. www.theguardian.com/world/ 2016/aug/10/a-short-history-of-nauru-australias-dumping-ground-for-refugees. Accessed 17 February 2018. Web.

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Drucker, Johanna. “What is Graphic About Graphic Novels?” English Language Notes 46. 2(2008): 39–55. Print. Evershed, Nick, Ri Liu, Paul Farrell and Helen Davidson. “The Nauru Files”. The Guardian. 10 August 2016. www.theguardian.com/australia-news/ng-interactive/ 2016/aug/10/the-nauru-files-the-lives-of-asylum-seekers-in-detention-detailed-in-a -unique-database-interactive. Accessed 17 February 2018. Web. Fisher, Tim. “Telling a Guard’s Story”. Broadsheet. 20 February 2014. www.broa dsheet.com.au/sydney/art-and-design/article/global-mail-guards-story. Accessed 28 September 2014. Web. Flitton, Daniel and Marc Moncrief. “Refugees’ Mental Anguish in Australia’s ‘Guantanamo’”. The Sydney Morning Herald. 25 August 2014. smh.com.au. Accessed 14 September 2014. Web. Groensteen, Thierry. The System of Comics. Trans. Nick Nguyen. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2007. Print. Hughes-d’Aeth, Tony. Paper Nation: The Story of the Picturesque Atlas of Australia. Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2001. Print. Human Rights Council. “Report of the Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment – Advance Report, Juan E. Méndez”. 6 March 2015. www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/HRC/RegularSessions/Ses sion28/Documents/A_HRC_28_68_Add.1_AV.doc. Accessed 18 February 2018. Web. Maslov, Nikolai. Siberia. Trans. Blake Ferris and Lisa Barocas Anderson. Brooklyn, NY: Soft Skull Press, 2006. Print. McDermott, Quentin. “The Guard’s Story”. Australian Broadcasting Corporation. 15 September 2008. Television. Mickwitz, Nina. Documentary Comics: Graphic Truth-Telling in a Skeptical Age. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan US, 2016. Print. Migration Act 1958 (Cth). Pearson, Luke. “Some People”. http://lukepearson.com/Comics/Some-People (2009). Accessed 27 May 2018. Web. Refugee Art Project. “About RAP”. therefugeeartproject.com/home/faqs/. Accessed 18 February 2018. Web. Sacco, Joe. Journalism. London: Jonathan Cape, 2012. Print. Sacco, Joe. Palestine. London: Jonathan Cape, 2003. Print. Said, Edward. “Homage to Joe Sacco”, Introduction in Joe Sacco, Palestine. London: Jonathan Cape, 2003. Print. Scherr, Rebecca. “Shaking Hands with Other People’s Pain: Joe Sacco’s Palestine”. Mosaic 46. 1(2013): 19–36. Supreme Court of Victoria. Majid Karami Kamasaee v The Commonwealth of Australia & Ors. Settlement Approval. Accessed 18 February 2018. www.streaming. scvwebcast1.com/kamasaee-v-the-comm-of-aust-ors-6sep17/. Web. Wallman, Sam, Nick Olle, Pat Grant and Pat Armstrong. “At Work Inside Our Detention Centres: A Guard’s Story”. The Global Mail. February 2014. serco-story. theglobalmail.org/. Accessed 31 March 2014. Web.

Further reading Agamben, Giorgio. State of Exception. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2005. Print. Bray, Joe, Alison Gibbons and Brian McHale (eds). Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2012. Print.

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Chute, Hillary. “Graphic Narrative”, in Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature. Eds Joe Bray, Alison Gibbons and Brian McHale. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2012. 407–419. Print. Chute, Hillary L. and Marianne DeKoven. “Introduction: Graphic Narrative”. Modern Fiction Studies 52. 4(2006): 767–782. Print. Dekoven, Marianne. A Different Language: Gertrude Stein’s Experimental Writing. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983. Print. Hirsch, Marianne. “Editor’s Column: Collateral Damage”. PMLA 119. 5(2004): 1209–1215. Print. Scherr, Rebecca. “Framing Human Rights: Comics Form and the Politics of Recognition in Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza”. Textual Practice. 3 October 2014. doi:10.1080/0950236X.2014.952771. Web. Spiegelman, Art. “What the %@&*! Happened to Comics?” Melbourne Town Hall. 8 October 2013. Public lecture.

Afterword

This book has explored the relationship between memory and its representation in comics by arguing that the comics form, and its mechanics, are an ideal vehicle through which to explore the fragmented and mutable nature of both conscious (explicit) and unconscious (implicit) memories. In both structure and form, comics offer a modern apparatus for exploring personal, collected, historical and disavowed memories. Understanding memory as a process of ongoing reconstruction and representation, as well as one of recall, makes the plasticity of the comics page, and the tension generated between its verbal and visual elements, invaluable for exploring this phenomenon. Utilising absence as well as presence, comics encourage readers to supplement the text with particular associations and connections, animating the story in ways that can be particularly meaningful to each reader. The preceding chapters have analysed the construction of memories in the face of migration, trauma and loss (Chapters 1 and 3); the reconstruction of cultural memories (Chapter 2); memories of illness from the perspective of the witness but also the person directly afflicted by health conditions (Chapter 4); as well as post-traumatic forms of recollection and their representation across comics, photographs, and digital animation (Chapter 5); and, finally, the representation of detention in two online comics (Chapter 6). The chapters also explored the way that boundaries between individual, collective, and national memories, interact, reflected in the cross-discursive, highly intertextual, and exploratory strategies adopted in each of the texts. As Susan Suleiman puts it, the “question of self-representation” resides at the heart of how we remember; “[h]ow we view ourselves, and how we represent ourselves to others, is indissociable from the stories we tell about our past” (2006, 1). Comics allows us to explore these questions through a performative mode that is particularly beneficial for reconstructing the past in terms of its affective qualities, because it incorporates a multiplicity of registers – verbal and visual (whether symbolic, iconic, metonymic, photographic, photorealistic, collage, and any combination of these) – that mimic the divergences and lacunae, as well as convergences of how we experience the world and its mediated presentation via culture. Writing on comics in 1964, Marshall McLuhan noted that the “mayhem and violence” in early comics (which he dates to 1935), were all that its detractors could see,

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and that in the “[m]eantime, the violence of an industrial and mechanical environment had to be lived and given meaning and motive in the nerves and viscera of the young” (168). In other words, the power of comics is that they allow both creators and readers to visualise the fracturing power of violence and oppression – at the level of the individual, domestic, communal, national, and international – in powerful and creative ways. This remains just as relevant today in the face of ongoing losses that many communities live with throughout the world. The desire not to forget accounts for the continued explorations about the place of memory, its limitations and failures, across many domains of inquiry. Memory, both as a process and record of the past, immediately raises questions about the relationship between the present and its relationship to the ‘lost’ past. Indeed, Clifton Spargo suggests that “it is precisely because our cultural modes of memory so often neglect the other […] that unresolved mourning becomes a dissenting act, a sign of an irremissible ethical meaning” (2004, 6). The act of literary wounding can thus be regarded as an entry into the space of remembrance, as something that “pricks” or punctures the unravelling of the future horizon. Through the use of substitution and displacement, comics can mimic the processes of encoding that shape traumatic memory. The reliance of the form on structuring time and space is invaluable for remembering the past, as it allows artists to layer the page through the architectural as well as narratological dimensions of lived experience. The present speaks to the past not only in the arrangement of the panels (as depicted in Figure 0.1) but also, for example, in the layering of captions over the diegetic dialogue of the past. Comics have a strong legacy of exploring memory and the multifaceted nature of memory itself. For example, the panels in Joe Sacco’s Palestine (2003) direct the reader’s eye towards multiple elements of the page, creating a staccato and interrupted reading pulse, whereas other works such as Miriam Katin’s We Are on Our Own (2006) and Letting It Go (2013), her autobiographical stories about the horrors of the Holocaust and its aftermath, offer an aesthetic that induces a more ‘legato’ reading experience though her use of regular panel dimensions and the gentler incisions of her pencil work. By contrast, time in Sacco’s The Great War (2013) unfolds entirely differently, as he depicts the first day of the Battle of the Somme across a 24-foot long panoramic sheet of paper, in which characters such as General Douglas Haig appear several times along the panorama. In considering these works, one could consider how panoramic time may unfold differently to haptic or embodied time for example, and how each construction allows the representation of traumatic memory to enact various temporal modalities. Although the subject matter of these works differs widely, they share a concern for re-constructing moments of crisis, all of which have generated ongoing questions about the role of ethics, responsibility, archives, and the dynamics of mnemohistory – or, “how the past is remembered” (Jan Assman quoted in Tamm 2008, 501). As Hillary Chute suggests, comics provide a platform through which it is possible to visualise “the workings of the individual mind on the page, especially memory as a process, and revealing the imbrication of past and present as a

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psychic structure through a visualized grammar” (Disaster Drawn 2016, 102). Indeed, central to their art of representation, comics embody not only recall, but also forgetting, through the tension between image and text (which mimics the interface between implicit and explicit memories) and also within the space of the gutter – a space for unconscious memories – from which some elements of the past can be retrieved. Of particular interest when exploring traumatic and troubled histories is the way that memories can come to be embodied within the somatic responses of the body. This form of record is mostly invisible to the human eye, yet comics can materialise this archive through their visual strategies. As we have seen, the expression of bodily memories is materialised on the page through the use of gesture and repetition, but also in the way that artists such as David B. and David Small have described drawing as a therapeutic process for accessing and discharging painful memories. So, for example, epilepsy acquires the metaphoric form of a dragon in Epileptic; the use of Dutch angles in Stitches prepares the reader for the familial tensions that structure Small’s childhood; while in “A Guard’s Story”, the enforcement of borders wounds the bodies of some detainees in a bureaucratised analogue to physical self-harm. This confirms the understanding that as a narrative art, comics access our desire for storytelling in meaningful ways. As Karen Kurcynski suggests, “[d]rawing is a significant site of social mediation, evoking fundamental longings for unfettered expression, universality and timelessness, childlike innocence, immediacy and spontaneity, delicacy and vulnerability” (2011, 94). The range of discursive modes that comics can embody, such as the photographic, iconic, abstract, digital, pictorial, as well as drawing itself, allow artists and comics creators to explore the divergent aspects of memory itself. Indeed, arguing for an “architectural unconscious” of comics, Catherine Labio explores the reflection of domestic architecture in comics produced contemporaneously. For example, she juxtaposes the Art Nouveau-inspired schematic design in McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland (1905–1926) with its popularity in building facades, suggesting more generally that “the architectural disposition of the page intensifies the emotive charge of comics by triggering individual and collective memories—of home, childhood, and earlier examples of narrative art” (2015, 317). Such architectural-design components are, as discussed, visible in Satrapi’s Persepolis – with its use of tessellation and reference to Persian miniature paintings, as well as in Epileptic, particularly in the staging of crisis and battle scenes in a mode reminiscent of Biblia pauperum. The presence of comics online invites related questions about how memory is encoded and discarded (cached? deleted?) and narrated in this “infinite canvas” (McCloud 2000, 220), and how it is staged across social media platforms. More broadly, Gillian Whitlock concludes that comics are not merely a hybrid medium, but that they transcend both graphic arts and prose fiction by requiring readers to play an active role in constructing the meaning of the text (2006, 970). W.J.T. Mitchell similarly suggests that “comics is a transmedium, moving across all boundaries of performance, representation, reproduction,

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and inscription to find new audiences, new subjects, and new forms of representation” (2014, 259). Indeed, it is precisely the heterodox nature of comics and their highly intertextual nature, their transmediatic and cross-discursive capacity that makes them so exciting, as demonstrated by the works this book has analysed. Returning to the analysis of “Hell” by Yoshihiro Tatsumi from the Introduction, the manga clearly illustrates the dangers of interpretation, the risks of representation, and the way that cultural memory can be generated, contested, and eroded over time. The number of texts and technologies that could inform future projects on memory and comics is varied and dynamic with works such as Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do (2017), G.B. Tran’s Vietnamerica (2010) on migration and history; in the field of graphic medicine Ghosts (2016) by Raina Telgemier (cystic fibrosis), Marbles: Mania, Depresssion, Michaelangelo and Me (2012) by Ellen Forney (bi-polar disorder), Katie Green’s Lighter Than My Shadow (2013) (anorexia); and Undocumented: The Architecture of Migration Detention (2014) by Tings Chak, a remarkable book about purpose-built spaces of detention in Canada and architectural memory. In another “Afterword”, W.J.T. Mitchell describes a personal encounter with comics in a ‘thank you’ card drawn by Nathaniel McClennan. The card is characterised by its layered and loosely spiralled structure, in which sequential reading order is suspended for another kind of affective logic, one that speaks to the enormity of the loss that Nathaniel is drawing to – a card of gratitude, but also a lament for Mitchell’s now-deceased son, and McClennan’s friend. In his detailed reading of the page, Mitchell suggests that “comics themselves are organized as a unified, yet internally differentiated body, playing upon temporal sequence and spatial synchronicity” (2014, 265). The notion of comics as an “internally differentiated body” accesses the plurality and diversity that characterise the medium, its capacity to host multiple forms of textual, textural, and visual significations of presence and absence. These diverse forms of legibility in comics means that they can help scholars of memory map the collisions and divisions between the construction of temporality and space, and the location of memory.

Works cited Bui, Thi. The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir. New York: Abrams ComicArts, 2017. Print. Chak, Tings. Undocumented: The Architecture of Migration Detention. Maxville: Ad Astra Comix, 2014. Print. Chute, Hillary. Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form. Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016. Print. Forney, Ellen. Marbles: Mania, Depresssion, Michaelangelo and Me. London: Constable & Richardson Ltd, 2012. Print. Green, Katie. Lighter Than My Shadow. London: Jonathan Cape, 2013. Print.

Afterword

189

Katin, Miriam. Letting it Go. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly Publications, 2013. Print. Katin, Miriam. We Are on Our Own. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly Publications, 2006. Print. Kurcynski, Karen. “Drawing is the New Painting”. Art Journal 70. 1(2011): 92–110. Print. Labio, Catherine. “The Architecture of Comics”. Critical Inquiry 41. 2(2015): 312–343. Print. McCloud, Scott. Reinventing Comics: How Imagination and Technology Are Revolutionizing an Art Form. New York: HarperCollins, 2000. Print. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004[1964]. Print. Mitchell, W. J. T. “Comics as Media: Afterword”. Critical Inquiry 40. 3(2014): 255–265. Print. Sacco, Joe. Palestine. London: Jonathan Cape, 2003. Print. Sacco, Joe. The Great War: The First Day of the Battle of the Somme. London: Jonathan Cape, 2013. Print. Spargo, R. Clifton. The Ethics of Mourning: Grief and Responsibility in Elegiac Literature. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. Print. Suleiman, Susan Rubin. Crises of Memory and the Second World War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. Print. Tamm, Marek. “History as Cultural Memory: Mnemohistory and the Construction of the Estonian Nation”. Journal of Baltic Studies 39. 4(2008): 499–516. Print. Telgemier, Raina . Ghosts. New York: Scholastic, 2016. Print. Tran, G.B. Vietnamerica: A Family’s Journey. New York: Villard, 2010. Print. Whitlock, Gillian. “Autographics: The Seeing ‘I’ of the Comics”. Modern Fiction Studies 52. 4(2006): 965–979. Print.

Index

A Child’s Life and Other Stories (2001) 130 A Ciel Ouvert [Open Air] 147 A Harlot’s Progress 43 A Rake’s Progress 43 A Sketch Book of Japan (1884) 58n12 Aboriginal Australians 152–3 Adams, Jeff 148 aesthetic movement 30 Afghanistan Storyboard 168 Afghan–Soviet War 138 African Americans 30 Agamben, Giorgio 171–2, 175, 181n9 age 48–57 aggression 150, 157 Ahmadinejad, Mahmoud 106 Ahmed, Safdar 163, 165, 168, 177–9 Alan’s War (2008) 141 Alice in Wonderland 128, 130 Alien Land Act 1913 (US) 41 alternative modes of knowing 164 American Born Chinese (2006) 57, 62–74, 84, 85n5, 90 American Idol 70 amnesia 66, 154; collective 156; cultural 71, 73; see also forgetfulness Amnesty International (AI) 168 angles 129; see also Dutch angles animation 133, 152, 158 anime 30 anti-naturalism 1 anxiety of deletion 92 aphorism 17 Apocalypse Now (1979) 152 aporia 155 Appleseed (1985–1989) 35 apprehension 82–3 Arabic dialogue 157–8 Archie 85n4

architectural memory 187–8 archives 62 Aretaeus of Cappadocia 125 Ariel (Arik) Sharon 157 Aristotle 123 Armstrong, Pat 163, 167, 170–1, 174, 176 Art Noveau 30 art of tensions 18 artistic style 30 Asahi Graph (1923–2000) 29 Asianness 43, 70–1 Asiatic Exclusion League 41 Assman, Aleida 7, 63 asylum seekers 1, 73–4, 163–82; rights of 166; see also immigration; migration; refugees At Work Insider our Detention Centres: A Guard’s Story (2014) 58n13, 159, 163–82, 180–1, 181n7, 187 Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) 166 Australian Screen 153 authenticity 18 autobiographical comics 1, 8, 20–1 autonoetic consciousness 19; see also memory Baddeley, Alan 2–3 Baetens, Jan 123 Bambi (1942) 30 bandes dessinées (drawn strips) 20, 114 banter 82 bare life, notion of 171–2 Baroque period 51 Barthes, Roland 48, 143 Bartlett, Frederic 2 Basij militia 106 Baudrillard, Jean 18 beaches: significance of 85n9

Index Beauchard, David B. 89–90, 117–26, 133n4, 187 Beauty and the Beast (1955) 118 Bechdel, Alison 47, 90, 143, 167 Beck, Ulrich 84 Bendor, Roy 152 Benjamin, Walter 92, 99, 101 Ben-Yishai, Ron 156–7 Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1922) 154 Bhabha, Homi K. 7 Biafra war (1967–1970) 140 Biblia paurperum 117–18, 187 bilingualism 30–1 Billy, Me & You (2011) 112 bin Laden, Osama 139 Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary 20 Blanchard, Jerrold 43 Bliss, Tim 2 blogs 169 Blue (2012) 57, 62–3, 73–84 Bogart, Anne 115 Bombing of Hiroshima (1945) 12, 14–15, 20 boong: definition 80–1 border control 73 Borges, Jorge Luis 43 Boym, Svetlana 48 Brigg, Raymond 45 Bring Up Father (1913–2000) 29 British Empire 77 Bui, Thi 188 Burns, Charles 118 Butler, Judith 17–18, 62, 78, 82–3, 170–2, 174, 177 Calvin & Hobbes 133n6 Camera Lucida (2000 [1980]) 143 Campbell, Stuart 3, 21n1 cancer 95, 100, 112–13, 127–31 Captain America (2002) 181n7 cards of gratitude 188 Carpo, Mario 48–9 Cartier-Bresson, Henri 143 Caruth, Cathy 92, 97, 100, 155 Castro, Fidel 94 censorship 8 certifying experience 149 chador (full length hijab) 104 chadri (long veil) 149 Chak, Tings 188 Chaudhuri, Shohini 152, 156 Cheng, Ann Anlin 46 chiaroscuro lighting 118

191

Children and Young Persons (Harmful Publishing) Act 1955 (UK) 8 children: child abuse 166; rights of 166; slavery 43; social behaviour of 8 Chinese Exclusion Act 1882 (US) 32, 63, 73 Chinese immigrants 63–73 Chinese landscape paintings 114 Chinese language 66–7, 73 Christiansen, Hans-Christian 1, 6 Chute, Hillary 5, 106, 113, 116, 133, 181n2, 186 cinematic narrative 45 citizenship rights 95 closure: principle of 3, 22n2 Coad, Peter 152–3 Cocteau, Jean 118 coffee paintings 178 Collingridge, Graeme 2 colour, use of 78 comics journalism 139, 158, 167 communism 103–4 concentration camps 181n5; see also detention Condorito (1949–1993) 35 connectedness 182n10 consumerism 149 contact sheets 142–4, 148; comic strips vs 144 Cook’s arrival at Botany Bay (1771) 77 Council for Refugee Advocacy (Australia) 168 couplets 179 Couser, Thomas 130 Crapanzano, Vincent 113 Cronulla Riots (2005) 74, 85n9 cross-discursivity 5, 185, 188 Crumb, Robert 177 cult value 15 cultural exclusion 62–85 cultural memory see memory Cvetkovich, Ann 91 Czaplicka, John 63 Dada 10 Daria (1997–2001) 66 Davis, Rocío G. 65, 73, 85n4 de Chirico, Giorgio 43 De Sica, Vittorio 44 DeKoven, Marianne 5 dementia 3 Depuis 139 Der Spiegel 149 Detective Comics 64

192

Index

detention 163–82; detainees’ bodies 172; indefinite 21, 170–1, 180, 181n8 detritus 7, 143 Dillon, Robert 157 disability 7; socio-somatics of 120 discursive modes of comics 187 disease 90; see also illness Disney 30 dissociation 129, 133n6 dissolve technique 54–5 Doctor Mabuse the Gambler (1922) 118 documentary 116, 133, 147; authenticity 18; comic books 28, 139; film 18; genre 11; proofs 142; webcomics see webcomics Dong Yuan 114 Dong, Lan 64, 85n6 Dongtian Mountain Hall 114 Doolittle, Hilda 22n3 Doré, Gustave 43–4 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 115 Doucet, Julie 90, 115 drawing: hand-drawing 165, 177; line drawing, tactile quality of 165; therapy of 115, 118–19, 121, 126 dreams 11, 102, 117, 127 Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend (1904–1925) 29 Drucker, Johanna 165, 168 Dutch angles 127, 128, 187 duty of care 180 Eisner, Will 116 ellipsis/elision 101–2, 106 emanata 66 emergency 171 epilambanein: definition 124 epilepsy 112–34 Epileptic (2005) 89–90, 99, 107, 112–26, 128, 133n2, 172, 187 epistemology 17–18 Erll, Astrid 3, 7, 156 Ernst, Max 43, 45, 118 exclusion: cultural 62–85 extra-diegetic captions 102, 106 fascism 97 Felix the Cat (1919) 29 felt space 114, 117 fibromyalgia 112, 133n1 film soundtracks 153 fingerprinting 181n9 Fisk, Robert 158 flashbacks 133n6, 155, 156

flashes 163 folding, technique of see origami Folman, Ari 11, 17, 138, 151–8 Footnotes in Gaza (2009) 139, 145 forgetfulness 155; see also amnesia Forney, Ellen 112, 188 Fort/da 8, 57, 76–7, 92 Foucault, Michel 62 Four Corners 167 foxing 21, 42 framing 62; unframed space 172–3 Frankenstein (1931) 128 French colonialism 92 Freud, Sigmund 3, 8–9, 76, 92, 154–5 Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006) 47, 90, 143, 167, 172 fuzziness 45 gag style 40 Gardner, Jared 6, 8, 21, 63, 70 gaze 54, 97–8; downcast 177; medical 130 Gemeyal, Bashir 152 Gentlemen’s Agreement 1907 41 geometric design 107n6 German Expressionism 90, 118 gesture 51–4; illocutionary force 132; memory and 131–2; non-verbal 131; see also non-verbal communication Ghost in the Shell (2017) 62 Ghosts (2016) 188 gif animations 169 Gilmore, Leigh 7, 113 Glidden, Sarah 139 Gloeckner, Phoebe 130 Glowacka, Dorata 98 Gogol, Nikolai 10 Golden Gate Institute San Francisco 28 Goya, Francisco 44, 146 graffiti 83–4 grand narratives 6 Grant, Pat 57, 62, 74–84, 163, 167, 170–1, 174, 176 graphic medicine: definition 112–13; see also disease; illness; pain Great Depression in the USA (1929–1941) 40 Green, Justin 20, 28 Green, Katie 188 Groensteen, Thierry 30 Guantanamo Bay 170–1, 181n7 Guibert, Emmanuel 11, 17, 47, 138, 141–2, 144–7 Gunning, Tom 81

Index hand-drawn aspect of comics 165; see also drawing hands 182n10 handwriting 179 Happy Hooligan (1900–1932) 29 haptic visuality 165, 172, 177, 182n10 Hasbro 67 Hatfield, Charles 5, 18, 64, 78 Heesen, Anke te 117 Hell (1971) 12, 143, 188 Hergé 141 hieroglyphs 62 Hippocrates 123 Hiroshima see Bombing of Hiroshima (1945) Hirsch, Marianne 19–20, 100–1 historiography 17–18 Hochberg, Gil 94, 156 Hogan’s Alley 58 Hogarth, William 43 Hokusai, Katsushika 30, 58n11, 76 Holman, Valerie 92 Holocaust 20, 101, 107–8n9, 122, 157, 186 homosexuality 7, 127 Hopper, Fred 29 horror genre 128 How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less (2010) 139 Huffington Post 180 Hughes-d’Aeth, Tony 172 human rights 149, 166 humanitarian crisis 166 humour 6, 29; as a response to trauma of war 92–4, 103; 146–7; see also gag style; jokes; laugh track; parody; puns; satire Hungerford, T.A.G. 45 Huyssen, Andreas 5, 19–20, 106 hyperframe 164, 181n1 Ichioka, Yuji 34–5 iconographic value 163 ideational trifecta 72 identity politics 62–85, 89–108; see also national identity idiom of witness: definition 132 illness: memories of 112–34; see also disease; medicine imaginative scaffolding 128 immigration 7–8, 27–58; see also asylum-seekers; migration Immigration Act 1924 (US) 40–1 impressionism 30

193

In the Shadow of No Towers (2004) 41, 100 ink washes 21 intersubjectivity 7 intertextuality 185, 188 Iran: Green Movement 106; miniature paintings 90–1; Revolution (1979) 89, 94–5, 97, 100 Iran-Iraq War 89 irony 6, 92 Islam: architecture 93; art 93, 107n6; fundamentalism 97; regime 89, 104 Israeli Defence Force (IDF) 152–3 issei 38–42 Japanese and Korean Exclusion League 41 Japanese Exclusion League of California 40 Japanese Peace Treaty (1951) 12, 22n5 jokes: dissemination of 92 Journalism (2012) 139 journalism see also comics journalism; photojournalism; webcomics 163 Journey to the West 65 Joyce, James 10 Julius Caesar 115 juxtaposition 6, 11, 126 Kafka, Franz 43 Kahlo, Frida 121 Kataeb Party (Lebanese Phalanges Party) 152 Katin, Miriam 45, 139, 186 Keaton, Buster 30 Kelly, Debra 92 Kiyama, Henry Yoshitaka 27–42, 71, 90 Knoepflmacher, U.C. 64 Kominsky-Crumb, Aline 90 Kraemer, Joseph 11, 20, 152 Kuhn, Annette 43 künstlerroman 117 Kunyosying, Kom 30 Kurcynski, Karen 187 Labio, Catherine 187 Landesman, Ohad 152 Lang, Fritz 118 Langford, Barry 71 Langford, Martha 47 Laub, Dori 98, 102, 107 laugh track 71 Lebanon War (1982) 153 Lefèvre, Didier 11, 17, 47, 138–42, 144–51, 159 Lefèvre, Pascal 123 Lemercier, Frederic 11, 17, 47, 138, 141

194

Index

lesbianism 127 Letting it Go (2013) 139, 186 Levi, Primo 102 Life 148 Lighter Than My Shadow (2013) 188 ligne claire (clear line) 66, 99 linguistics 115 literary wounding 186 Little Big Man (1970) 118 Little Nemo in Slumberland (1905–1926) 11, 29, 187 Little Sammy Sneeze 9–10 Lloyd, Harold 30 London: A Pilgrimage (1970 [1872]) 43 Los Caprichos 44 Lumière, Auguste 10 Lumière, Louis 10 Lustiger-Thaler, Henri 7, 11–12, 139 Madame Bovary 128 Magiorkinis, Gkikas 123 Magnum Foundation 142 Magnussen, Anne 1, 6 Magritte 126 manga 57n1, 188; gekiga 11–12, 22n4; migration and 27–58; US popularity 27 Marbles: Mania, Depresssion, Michaelangelo and Me (2012) 112, 188 Marie Curie 100 Mark Hopkins Institute of Art 29 Marks, J. Ryan 112 Marriage A-la-Mode 43 Marshall, Elizabeth 7 Masereel, Franz 118 Maslov, Nikoli 177 material existence 44 materialising: concept of 21, 22n7 Maus (2003) 6, 19–20, 47, 89, 106, 139, 143, 167, 172 Mayflower 68 McCay, Winsor 9–11, 29, 38, 152, 187 McCloud, Scott 3, 18, 22n2 McKinney, Mark 92 McLuhan, Marshall 185 McManus, George 29 meaning: literal and metonymic 18–19 Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) 138–40, 142, 149, 159 medicine 149; medical discourse 114–15; see also graphic medicine Medieval literature 117 melancholy 75–9, 83, 91 memoir 7, 8, 90, 128

memory: architectural 187–8; archives of 20; authentication of 18; autobiographical 2–3, 7, 117; collective 14, 19, 122; community 151; cultural 3, 17, 29, 34, 40, 63, 65–73, 156, 186; declarative 19; definitions 2; depth of 181n2; of detention 164; episodic 2–3; ethics of 15; explicit 19, 179, 185; false 155; gesture and 131–2; illness, of 112–34; implicit 19, 22n6, 164, 179, 185; individual 19, 122; limitations of 4; local 75–9; mnemic capacity 155; multidirectional 21; multimodal 138–59; multiplicity of forms 105, 144, 147, 158–9, 181n2; neuroscientific research 2; nostalgic 45–8; olfactory 103; painful 187; photographs and 47–8; playful forms of 94; procedural 22n6; remembrance and 103, 138, 158; representation and 2, 153; scarcity of 181n2; scientific research 19; screen 101; semantic 19; studies 2; suppression of 151; temporality and 4–5; trace 2; traumatic 17, 19, 58n14, 12–3, 130, 133, 138, 146, 186; unconscious 4; see also postmemory; recollection Mendez, Juan 166 mental health 1, 95–6, 101, 166, 176 metaphor 92, 117, 187 Meyers, Mitzi 64 Mickwitz, Nina 114, 116, 142–3, 145, 154, 163–4 migration 6, 21, 27–58, 163–82; rights of migrants 166; see also asylum-seekers; immigration Migration Act 1958 166, 171 mirrors 129 mise-en-abyme sequence 53, 57 Mitchell, W.J.T. 8, 187–8 mnemohistory 186 modernism 11, 17 modes of representation 7 monochrome 21, 104 Morris, Richard 2 mourning: modality of 93–5 Mujahedeen (political-militant organisation) 100, 145, 148 multiculturalism 46 multimodality: of comics 11, 15; of memory 138–59 mutual enrichment 10 My New York Diary (2011) 90, 115

Index Nakazawa, Keiji 20, 28 narrative loops 169 narrative structure 18 Nast, Thomas 65 national identity 7, 31, 34, 62–85; see also identity politics Nauru files 166 Nazism 92, 157, 158 Need More Love (2007) 90 negative space 11, 169, 172 neo-Nazism 97 neorealism 44 New Superman 65 New York Art Students League 29 New York Herald 9 newspaper strips 58n10 Nietzsche, Friedrich 155 non-fiction genre 7–8 non-verbal communication 127, 131–2, 177 North, Michael 147 Nosferatu (1922) 118 Nuckel, Otto 118 obsessive-compulsive disorder 20 Oh, Stella 71 Okamoto, Ippei 29 Olick, James 7 Oliphant, Pat 68 Olle, Nick 163, 167, 170–1, 174, 176 On Sleep and Walking (250 B.C.E.) 123 One Thousand and One Nights (1974) 118 One Way Street (1928) 17, 99 online comics see webcomics ontology of the subject 17–18 Ore Wa Mita (I Saw It) 20 origami 48–57 Orwell, George 43 Oshawa, George 123 Ostby, Marie 90 Otherness 8, 79–84, 164 Ott, Thomas 118 Outcault, Richard F. 58n10 outsider status 57; see also immigration; migration Over London – By Rail 43–4 pagination: absence of 45 pain: bodily 116; visual iconography of 113; see also graphic medicine; illness Palestine (1997) 139 Palestine (2003) 5, 158, 167, 186 Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) 153–4

195

panel arrangement 6, 8, 113, 163, 167 Paraskeva, Anthony 51, 116, 132 Paris Match 148 parody 6, 78, 90 Paronnaud, Vincent 106 Passerini, Luisa 8 Pearson, Luke 169 Pedri, Nancy 151 Penn, Arthur 118 people smugglers 74 Perec, George 101 performativity 18 Persepolis (2003/04) 6, 29, 84, 89–107, 143, 146, 164, 167, 172–3, 181n2, 187 Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood (2003) 89–90, 93 Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return (2004) 89, 95–6, 100, 103, 105 Persepolis 2.0: Iran’s Post-Election Uprising: Hopes and Fears Revealed 106–7 perspective: multiple 129 Peters, John 140, 142 photo-chemical images 142 photographic spectatorship 151 photographs: memory and 47–8 photography 18, 133, 138–59; Holocaust 101; trauma of war 100 photojournalism 141–2, 145, 148; global impact of 149; historical evolution of techniques 148 picture brides 29 Picture Post 148 Pizzino, Christopher 3 Planète (1961–1972) 123 play therapy 126; see also drawing Poe, Edgar Allen 115 political ideologies 97 Polly and Her Pals (1925–1927) 29 Polonsky, David 11, 17, 138, 151–2 polyphonic reading 45 polysemiotics 3 Pont, Xavier Marcó Del 92 pop culture 64–6 post-combat stress disorder 154–6 postmemory: definition 19–20; see also memory postmodernism 6–7 Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (2004) 170 precariousness 82–3 premonitory structures 99 Preston, Margaret 81 Proctor, Jennifer 55

196

Index

progress: concept of 15, 17 prompts 142 propaganda 11, 149 psychoanalysis 143 psychology: Gestalt 3; perceptual 3 public discourse 116 puns 38 punctuation (grammatical) 35 Quintilian 128 race 7, 181n7 racism 38, 58n4, 62–85, 95; silent 72 radical substitutability 83 rain 131 Rastegar, Kamran 156, 158 reading practices 5, 18, 46, 163 realism 150–1 recognition 82–3 recollection 2–4, 83; see also memory Red Leap Theatre 28 Refugee Art Project (2010) 178 Refugee Convention (1951) 166 refugees 1, 28, 73, 166, 168–9, 173, 178, 181nn7–8; see also asylum-seekers; immigration; migration registers 21 Renaissance painting 51 repression 66–9 Resolution 201 (US) 63 revolution and war 21, 89–108 rhizomatic structure 47, 169 Rickman, Lance 10 Rigney, Ann 3, 7 Rios, René Pepo 35 rock opera 11 Roe, Annabelle Honess 10, 152 Roediger, Henry 2 Rolling Blackouts (2016) 139 Roman letters 46 Rothberg, Michael 14, 18, 21, 146 Rothschild, Babette 129, 133n6 Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature 164 Sabra and Shatila massacre (1982) 138, 152, 154, 156–7 Sacco, Joe 5, 139, 145, 158, 163, 167, 176–7, 186 Sacramento Union 40 Safe Area Goražde (2000) 139 Safety Last! (1923) 30 Said, Edward 5–6, 180 Salome (1986) 11

San Francisco Institute of Art 29 satire 38, 43, 92, 118 Satrapi, Marjane 6, 29, 84, 89–106, 107n9, 118, 143, 146, 167, 187 Satyricon 118 Scherr, Rebecca 145, 165 Schodt, Frederik L. 28–31, 40–2, 57n1 School of Decorative Arts, Strasbourg 96 Schoolboys episodes 35, 58n8, n9 Schultheis Moore, Alexandra 150–1 Schuster, Joe 65 Scooby Doo 85 screen memories 101 scrolling 164, 169, 174 scrolls 133n4 self-harm 166, 175–6, 187 self-reflexivity 63 self-representation 185 semantic enrichment 30 sepia 21, 42, 44, 46, 47, 53, 82 sequencing 4, 144 sequential comics 8, 63 Seuss Geisel, Theodor 76 Seven Chances (1925) 30 sexual abuse 180 sexual assault 166 sexuality 90, 143 shell shock 154–5 Shenton, David 11 Shirow, Masamune 35, 62 Siberia (2006) 177 Siegel, Alexis 139 Siegel, Jerry 65 signatures 66 Sinking of the RMS Lusitania (1915) 10–11 sitcom genre 71 Sixteen Candles (1984) 62 slang 82 slapstick 90 Small Things (2016) 45 Small, David 19, 91, 113–14, 120, 126–32, 187 Smith, Greg M. 6 Smith, Richard Cándida 20, 131 Smith, Sidonie 8 Snake River Massacre in Oregon (1887) 63 social media 7, 106, 187 socio-cultural contexts 156 sociological approaches 85n9 Some People (2009) 169 Song, Min 63 Sontag, Susan 47, 145, 150, 158

Index Spare Parts Puppet Theatre 27 Spargo, Clifton 186 spatial grounding 5 speech balloons 102, 106, 147 Speedy (1928) 30 Spiegelman, Art 3, 6, 11, 19–20, 28, 31, 41, 47, 81, 89, 100, 106, 122, 139, 143, 167 splitting: of witness position 145 Sports Illustrated 148 Squier, Susan M. 112, 120 Stand By Me (1986) 75 state of exception 171–2 Stern 149 Sterrett, Cliff 29 Stitches: A Memoir (2009) 6, 19, 91, 99, 107, 112–14, 116, 120, 126–32, 164, 173, 187 Streeton, Nicola 112 structure of comics 116, 151 structure of uncertainty 84 Sturken, Marita 15, 17 suicide 90, 96 Suleiman, Susan 7, 101, 185 Sullivan, Pat 29 Sunday funnies 29 Superman 65 surrealism 10, 118 Survival in Auschwitz 102 Sutu see Campbell, Stuart Sydney Morning Herald 180, 181n8 symbolism: of the occult and arcana 117 Tabachnik, Stephen 117 tableaux 99 Taft, William 36 Tales from Outer Suburbia (2008) 43 Taliban, the 139, 165, 168 Tamm, Marek 7 Tan, Shaun 18, 27, 42–56, 74, 118 Tang Dynasty Chinese handscrolls 66, 85n5 Tatsumi, Yoshihiro 11–16, 22n4, 143, 188 tattoos 181n9 Telotte, J.P. 11 témoignage 140, 159n1 temporal duration 153, 159n2 tessellation 93, 107n6 testimony: definition 97, 140–2; significance of 147; visual 27, 40; see also témoignage Tezuka, Osamu 30 The Arrival (2006) 18, 27, 42–57, 118, 163

197

The Australian 180 The Bad Doctor (2014) 112 The Battle of the Argonne (1964) 126 The Best We Could Do (2017) 188 The Bicycle Thief (1948) 44 The Bulletin 78–9 The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1921) 128 The Complete Wimmen’s Comix (2016) 90 The Diary of a Teenage Girl (2015) 130 The Elephant Celebes (1921) 45 The Fixer (2003) 139 The Four Immigrants Manga: A Japanese Experience in San Francisco, 1904–1924 [Manga Yonin Shosei] (1999 [1931]) 27–41, 43, 57, 71, 90, 92, 99, 118, 147, 163, 169, 181n7 The Four Immigrants: An American Musical Manga 27 The Global Mail 165 The Great War (2013) 139, 186 The Idiot 115 The Insidious Dr Fu Manchu (1913) 64 The Japan Punch (1862–1887) 38 The Lodger (1927) 128 The Lost Thing (2000) 43, 45 The Lovers II (1928) 126 The Mysterious Dr. Fu Manchu (1929) 69 The Nose (1836) 10 The Origin of German Tragic Drama [1928] 92 The Photographer: Into War-Torn Afghanistan with Doctors Without Borders (2006) 11, 17, 21, 47, 93, 99, 133, 138–53, 158–9, 164, 179 The Rabbits (2000) 43 The Red Tree (2001) 43 The Sinking of the Lusitania (1918) 11, 38, 152 The Snowman (1978) 45 The Sprinkler Sprinkled 10 The Third Meaning 48 The Tracker (2002) 152–3 The Wounded Deer (1946) 121 theatre: art and 115 TheatreWorks Silicon Valley 27 These Memories Won’t Last (2016) 3 thickness 164–5, 181n2 thriller genre 128 Throne of Blood (1957) 121 Tintin 141 Toba-e tradition of cartooning 38, 58n11 Tran, GB 6, 188 Transformers (1984–1987) 66–7

198

Index

transmediatic nature of comics 187–8 trauma 6–17, 89–108; bodily 21; Freudian theory of 154–5; intergenerational 104– 5; mixed media 152; reassemblage 103; traumatic alienation 84 Triggs, Gillian 166 truth 3, 14, 17, 18, 91, 97, 147 Turlock Incident (1921) 38, 40–1, 43 Ty, Eleanor 62 Ulysses (1922) 10 Undocumented: The Architecture of Migration Detention (2014) 188 Union Jack 77 United Nations (UN) 166, 181n8 Universal Studios 128 University of California 28 University of Dundee 133n1 Urdu 179 utterance 140 Van Gogh, Vincent 115 Vanistendael, Judith 112 verisimilitude 18 Vietnam 92 Vietnamerica (2010) 6, 188 Villawood (2015) 163–6, 168, 177–81 violence 185–6; of derealisation 172 visual grammar 54, 129, 186–7 W or the Memory of Childhood [1975] 101 Waiting for Something to Happen: The Cronulla Race Riots 74 Wakasugi, Kaname (Japanese consul general (1930–1933)) 29 Walfred, Michele 65 Wallman, Sam 163, 167–8, 170–1, 173–4, 176–7 Waltz with Bashir (2008) 3, 11, 17, 21, 133, 138–9, 141, 151–9 war 89–108; documentary 21; see also revolution and war

War of the Ghosts experiment (1932) 2 Ward, Arthur Henry 64 Ward, Lynd 118 Watterson, Bill 133n6 We Are on Our Own (2006) 139, 186 webcomics 85n2, 163–82 Wertheimer, Max 3 Wertsch, James 2 When David Lost His Voice (2012) 112 White Australia Policy (1901–1966) 43, 78, 168 white space 17, 92, 99, 114, 133n6, 164, 169, 172–7 Whitlock, Gillian 187 Why I Write (2009) 129 Williams, Ian 112, 124 Williamson, John 78 Wirgman, Charles 38, 58n12 witness bearing 96–105, 140 women’s life writing 90, 105, 107n2 Wong Chu and the Queen’s Letterbox (1977) 45 wood block printing 58n11 woodcut prints 30, 114, 118 World Comics Finland 169 World Trade Towers attack (September 2001) 41, 100 World War I 10–11, 154 World War II 10, 15, 21n1, 42, 73, 141, 156 xenophobia 62–85 x-rays 127–8, 130 Yang, Gene Luen 62, 64–73, 78, 90 Yates, Frances 128 Yone, Noguchi 58n9 Yoneyama, Lisa 15 Yoshida, Shigeru 12 zen macrobiotics 123–4